[Applause]
I also wish that I was walking out with
a boombox but I just have water
which I’m gonna take a sip right now so
I have five kids twins and triplets yeah
I know
all boys yeah and no multiples do not
run in my family and yes it was IVF so
just get that on the table but over the
course of last year’s I hear myself
saying pretty typical mom things like
please take the lightsabers off the
dinner table yeah
you know I would prefer it if you did
not eat your brother’s head and the dog
is not a rocket so no you do not have
permission to launch him but the other
day I heard myself say yes why yes you
may watch that episode of The Simpsons
that they made about your dad because
the man in question their father you
know my ex-husband or as I sometimes
like to think of him my baby daddy so is
the visionary entrepreneur
on nervous it’s a visionary Elon Musk of
Tesla and SpaceX I met him when I was 18
he was 19 we were at college he would
call me up he always had classical music
playing in the background and he would
ask me out and I would say no
and he would call me up again and he
would ask me out and I would say no and
it went on like this until we ended up
living together in an apartment in the
Bay Area which we shared with three
roommates and a miniature dachshund who
was not house trained and by the time we
divorced we were living in a house in
Bel Air with no roommates and a
miniature dachshund who still was not
house trained so it’s a really funny
Simpsons episode elan has this
meaningful relationship with Homer it’s
very romantic
and at one point the Smithers character
says to another character that somebody
like Ilan must have a darkness in his
soul my mouth goes dry and as a dark
fantasy writer who’s had novels
published by major publishers and
stories and ontology Xand has a blog
this line leaped out at me because I
actually think a lot about creativity
and darkness and the larger-than-life
nature of these people that we call a
visionaries and geniuses or as my son
likes to say g9 and and darkness does
not have to mean evil you know it can
refer to anything that has not yet been
brought out into the light that lives in
the space beyond boundaries beyond our
comfort zone where a lot of us do not
want to go the writer Lucy H Pierce has
a quote that I like a lot she says as
creatives our job is to uncover what
lies in the darkness and give it new
life new identity and I realized that
artists and entrepreneurs are a lot
alike and that they are both obsessed
with creating something out of nothing
with pulling value from the dark so when
I was preparing this talk I said to Elon
you know so do you have any advice that
I could maybe give to bright young
things in the audience you might want to
like grow up to be you one day and
he did say something which I’ll get to
at the end but he also said you know I
don’t know if they would still want that
if they really knew what it’s like to be
me and it made me think that before we
call these people visionaries before
they have that kind of success we have
other words for them we call them you
know geek or outsider socially awkward
weird a little different odd one out
I’d been friends with one person for ten
years before he told me that when he was
a kid he hated going to school because
the other kids like to follow him home
and they would throw soda cans at his
head so he sought refuge in computer
games which got him into coding which
led to the creation of his first company
which he sold by the time he was in his
mid-20s so you know nobody is throwing
cans at him now one of the most
interesting pieces of advice I ever got
as a writer was to start out by
imitating the voices of your literary
heroes which is what most of us tend to
do anyway but to pay special attention
to those places where your voice does
not sound like a hero’s voice anymore
because it’s starting to insist on doing
its own thing is that’s the direction
that you should go in and I think in
life a lot of us reach that point
earlier than others because of the way
difference is kind of baked into the way
that we see the world I have one son who
was diagnosed with mild to moderate
autism when he was around four years old
he’s now considered to be off the
spectrum but he has this really you know
unique and beautiful mind and the other
day I took him out to Texas barbecue to
the horror of his vegetarian brother and
and he looked at me and out of the blue
he said mom what so what’s a faux tag of
photo and I said photographic memory and
and he said yeah yeah everybody always
tells me that I have
and so what is it and I explained to him
that while you know you store memories
as photographs and video clips and when
you’re trying to remember something you
scan these images until you can extract
the information that you want and by the
way you have a great sense of color and
so he looked at me and it’s jaw dropped
and he said you mean other people don’t
think like that and I was glad that I
could reflect that back to him as a
strength because strength and
vulnerability go hand-in-hand
you know what sets you apart can serve
as a unique differentiating factor or as
a friend of mine likes to say your
factor of Awesomeness but it can also
make you a target and any kid who spent
any time on a school playground knows
that this is a risky position for
anybody to take when visionary told me
that when he was a kid he became so
aware of how differently he thought from
other kids that he was afraid he was
insane and he was afraid that people
would find out about him and they would
come for him and they would take him
away and lock him up in an asylum
because he had read about these places
in books and who knows maybe if it’d
been born into very different
circumstances that’s exactly what would
have happened the word scapegoat comes
from an old ritual in which villagers
would gather in the square and they
would choose this poor adorable goat and
they would do the ceremony in which they
were loading up the goat with all their
sins and then they would chase him out
of the square out of the village into
the wilderness and it was understood
that the goat was carrying away all the
sins of the village and the people were
absolved without having to actually
change their behavior or even look too
closely at it but for it to work the
goat could not come back
you know it had to disappear into the
horizon it was probably going to Los
Angeles
so it was a cleansing ritual but it was
also a bonding ritual because part of
saying this is us is pointing at
somebody and saying you are not one of
us which has a way of segwaying into oh
and by the way it’s all your fault
an agent friend and I were discussing
this a book I might do in creativity and
feminism and he said to me you know
Justine the problem with the women who
read your blog is that well you guys
want to be these like audacious wild
Mavericks but you still retain these
traces of memories of when acting like
that might get you burned at the stake
and I thought to myself well maybe he
has a point and then I thought wait wait
hold up and I said to him you know the
women in my audience well we’ve spent
part if not most if not all of our lives
trying to amputate those parts of
ourselves it did not fit you know we’ve
tried to be pleasing and we’ve tried to
do what’s expected and we suck at it and
we eventually reach a point where we
realize that we are so depressed or
stuck or numb doubt that the only way to
save ourselves is to figure out how to
be ourselves on purpose the word
spinster originally referred to a woman
usually a young woman who are under
living spinning or weaving or as a
seamstress of course over time it became
a derogatory term that was used to refer
to a woman who could not land the
husband and had to rely on the largesse
of male relatives because she had no
household ever owned so she was pushed
to the edge of society if she did not
fall out of that society altogether
with the edge can be a very interesting
place to be I mean it can be lonely and
painful and sometimes dangerous and I
don’t mean to underplay any of that but
it’s also the place where something is
in the process of turning into something
else
revolution enters at the edges and so
some of these women who did not have to
Center their lives on housework or
serving the needs of men and children
well they could write and they did they
could write seriously and they did they
could become Jane Austen Emily Dickinson
the Bronte sisters one of the leading
novelist of the Victorian era was a
writer named George Eliot also
considered to be one of the greatest
writers in English language George’s
real name was Mary Ann Evans and she
grew up as a bit of an odd doc because
she was a brilliant girl in an age when
brilliant girl was an oxymoron and she
was considered to be ugly you know she
was considered to be unmarriageable and
she never did marry but when she hit
middle age she shacked up with this
younger guy who really adored her and
they lived together at wedlock for the
rest of their lives and society of
course was like shocked and appalled and
they would not invite Mary Ann to join
them in any of their reindeer games
so I don’t the edge she created her own
circle you know of free thinkers and
Bohemians and some of the leading
intellectuals of the day and she wrote
the seven novels that made her name see
Mary Ann Evans was a fallen woman but
George Eliot was a literary genius the
dancer and choreographer Martha Graham
who founded modern dance has a famous
quote about creativity that I just love
and it goes like this
there is a vitality a life force and
energy a quickening it translates
through you into action
and because there is only one of you in
all of time it is unique if you block it
it will not exist in any other medium
and it will be lost the world will not
have it it is not your business to
determine if it is good or if it is
valuable or how it compares to any other
expression it is your business to keep
it yours clearly and directly and to
keep the channel open you do not even
have to believe in yourself and your
work you just have to stay open and
aware to the urges that motivate you and
keep the channel open and part of the
work of keeping the channel open is to
show up day after day after day at a
room of your own or a corner of your own
where you can pursue your obsessions the
mythologists in the academic joseph
campbell refer to this as your bliss
station and he recommended that
everybody have one because it’s at your
bliss station where you can discover who
you are is creative and you can get on
and you could stay on the road to
mastery because it’s when you get really
good at whatever it is that you do that
the meaning you create for yourself
resonates with the inner lives of others
the best stories are the ones that we
surface from the dark I was in San
Francisco recently and a friend of mine
called around 1 o’clock in the morning
and you live just up the street and he
told me that a friend of ours a mutual
friend of ours had just dropped by with
his new girlfriend Courtney Love and did
I want to come hang out and so I was
like yeah and the Courtney had a band
whole and they did this album lived
through this which I listened to over
and over in college and it got me
through a difficult time and I wanted to
tell Courtney this so I meet my friend
and as we’re going up in the elevator he
says to me very casually
you know Courtney was just telling us
that she spent the last twenty years
listening to the women of Generation X
tell her how much they loved her album
lived through this and they’ve been
listening to it over and over and over
then it got them through a difficult
time and she’s really sick of hearing
this so I thought oh good to know
so we talked about Britney instead but I
believe that there are people who learn
how to carry the sins of a village who
learned how to interrogate that darkness
instead of being crushed by it and they
are the ones who become the
truth-tellers in the provocateurs the
artists and the visionaries of the
culture and they use their art and their
magic and their tech and their intellect
to not only show us who we are in a way
that we can understand and accept but
also who we can be they create new
tribes and new worlds that call their
people home during my years with Ilan I
became familiar with a distinct and
deeply tribal mentality known as
Engineers and once when my dad came to
visit I was taking him to see Ilan at
elands first company as if to and we
were crossing through the office park
and we saw these lanky dudes and jeans
and t-shirts and they were racing these
remote-controlled contraptions around
the parking lot and banging them into
cars and my dad said to me Oh are these
the children of the engineers and I said
no dad these are the engineers and when
ela and I would travel and we had to
fill out those um forums of customs that
wanted to know your occupation you know
Ellen never wrote down CEO or king of
the world or studly international
playboy he wrote engineer and he wore
jeans and t-shirts to work and whenever
we went shopping for clothes or later
consulted with the stylist whose name
was Martin he would say no no you don’t
understand I can’t
look cool or hip because I have to look
like an engineer and one of the things
that he told me although I don’t know if
it says true now as it was back then was
that engineers could not quite figure
out why it was that the suits made the
big money when it was the engineers who
actually built the stuff that they were
selling and meanwhile the suits would
listen to the engineers talk and they
would have no idea what they were saying
and that’s when I realized that Elon was
somebody who had learned to speak both
languages and he could move between the
tribes because he was an engineer in a
suit and he brought together world and
this is what an engineer does I mean
this is what a visionary does it not
only creates something new but they
become the living embodiment of it they
don’t just tell us a new story
they are that story and soon they don’t
even have to open up their mouths they
just walk into the room I recently read
a profile on Ilan and he’s quoted as
saying something to a friend and this
happened during the time we were still
married together and he said something
to this friend that he never said to me
and he was saying that he was prepared
to sacrifice everything his entire
fortune to get a rocket into orbit and
he said I don’t care if Justine and the
kids and I end up living in Justine’s
parents basement I’m gonna make this
happen and so I read this and I kind of
wanted to go back in time and go up to
him and take him by the shoulders and
look him very seriously in the eyes and
say have you seen my parents basement so
I’d like to wrap up by getting to
Ellen’s advice which is to always go
beyond memorizing formulas passing tests
to always go deep into the underlying
principles ever subject to track any
problem down to the root cause bury it
in the dirt in the dark and I would add
to that and say be brave enough be bold
enough
and be insane enough to see things more
completely more vividly more fully than
everybody else around you and refuse to
look away from what you see and what you
know even if people want to burn you at
the stake because visionaries they take
all that passion and their badass
personalities and their mad skills and
the mastery of their chosen subject
matter and they use it to put themselves
on the line unlike anybody else you’ll
ever meet and it’s this that allows them
to open up windows and to another deeper
reality in which transformation is
possible and things of Awe happen on a
regular basis because in the beginning
we don’t trust them because we think
they’re crazy but by the end we trust
them because we know they’re crazy
they’re crazy enough to accomplish
anything and risk it all in order to
bring us something new to believe in
they might make lousy husbands and
terrible wives they might be the friend
who never sends you a birthday present
and forgets to show up for coffee but
they bring light to the dark and they
show us the universe keep the channel
open thank you
[Music]
you
I also wish that I was walking out with
a boombox but I just have water
which I’m gonna take a sip right now so
I have five kids twins and triplets yeah
I know
all boys yeah and no multiples do not
run in my family and yes it was IVF so
just get that on the table but over the
course of last year’s I hear myself
saying pretty typical mom things like
please take the lightsabers off the
dinner table yeah
you know I would prefer it if you did
not eat your brother’s head and the dog
is not a rocket so no you do not have
permission to launch him but the other
day I heard myself say yes why yes you
may watch that episode of The Simpsons
that they made about your dad because
the man in question their father you
know my ex-husband or as I sometimes
like to think of him my baby daddy so is
the visionary entrepreneur
on nervous it’s a visionary Elon Musk of
Tesla and SpaceX I met him when I was 18
he was 19 we were at college he would
call me up he always had classical music
playing in the background and he would
ask me out and I would say no
and he would call me up again and he
would ask me out and I would say no and
it went on like this until we ended up
living together in an apartment in the
Bay Area which we shared with three
roommates and a miniature dachshund who
was not house trained and by the time we
divorced we were living in a house in
Bel Air with no roommates and a
miniature dachshund who still was not
house trained so it’s a really funny
Simpsons episode elan has this
meaningful relationship with Homer it’s
very romantic
and at one point the Smithers character
says to another character that somebody
like Ilan must have a darkness in his
soul my mouth goes dry and as a dark
fantasy writer who’s had novels
published by major publishers and
stories and ontology Xand has a blog
this line leaped out at me because I
actually think a lot about creativity
and darkness and the larger-than-life
nature of these people that we call a
visionaries and geniuses or as my son
likes to say g9 and and darkness does
not have to mean evil you know it can
refer to anything that has not yet been
brought out into the light that lives in
the space beyond boundaries beyond our
comfort zone where a lot of us do not
want to go the writer Lucy H Pierce has
a quote that I like a lot she says as
creatives our job is to uncover what
lies in the darkness and give it new
life new identity and I realized that
artists and entrepreneurs are a lot
alike and that they are both obsessed
with creating something out of nothing
with pulling value from the dark so when
I was preparing this talk I said to Elon
you know so do you have any advice that
I could maybe give to bright young
things in the audience you might want to
like grow up to be you one day and
he did say something which I’ll get to
at the end but he also said you know I
don’t know if they would still want that
if they really knew what it’s like to be
me and it made me think that before we
call these people visionaries before
they have that kind of success we have
other words for them we call them you
know geek or outsider socially awkward
weird a little different odd one out
I’d been friends with one person for ten
years before he told me that when he was
a kid he hated going to school because
the other kids like to follow him home
and they would throw soda cans at his
head so he sought refuge in computer
games which got him into coding which
led to the creation of his first company
which he sold by the time he was in his
mid-20s so you know nobody is throwing
cans at him now one of the most
interesting pieces of advice I ever got
as a writer was to start out by
imitating the voices of your literary
heroes which is what most of us tend to
do anyway but to pay special attention
to those places where your voice does
not sound like a hero’s voice anymore
because it’s starting to insist on doing
its own thing is that’s the direction
that you should go in and I think in
life a lot of us reach that point
earlier than others because of the way
difference is kind of baked into the way
that we see the world I have one son who
was diagnosed with mild to moderate
autism when he was around four years old
he’s now considered to be off the
spectrum but he has this really you know
unique and beautiful mind and the other
day I took him out to Texas barbecue to
the horror of his vegetarian brother and
and he looked at me and out of the blue
he said mom what so what’s a faux tag of
photo and I said photographic memory and
and he said yeah yeah everybody always
tells me that I have
and so what is it and I explained to him
that while you know you store memories
as photographs and video clips and when
you’re trying to remember something you
scan these images until you can extract
the information that you want and by the
way you have a great sense of color and
so he looked at me and it’s jaw dropped
and he said you mean other people don’t
think like that and I was glad that I
could reflect that back to him as a
strength because strength and
vulnerability go hand-in-hand
you know what sets you apart can serve
as a unique differentiating factor or as
a friend of mine likes to say your
factor of Awesomeness but it can also
make you a target and any kid who spent
any time on a school playground knows
that this is a risky position for
anybody to take when visionary told me
that when he was a kid he became so
aware of how differently he thought from
other kids that he was afraid he was
insane and he was afraid that people
would find out about him and they would
come for him and they would take him
away and lock him up in an asylum
because he had read about these places
in books and who knows maybe if it’d
been born into very different
circumstances that’s exactly what would
have happened the word scapegoat comes
from an old ritual in which villagers
would gather in the square and they
would choose this poor adorable goat and
they would do the ceremony in which they
were loading up the goat with all their
sins and then they would chase him out
of the square out of the village into
the wilderness and it was understood
that the goat was carrying away all the
sins of the village and the people were
absolved without having to actually
change their behavior or even look too
closely at it but for it to work the
goat could not come back
you know it had to disappear into the
horizon it was probably going to Los
Angeles
so it was a cleansing ritual but it was
also a bonding ritual because part of
saying this is us is pointing at
somebody and saying you are not one of
us which has a way of segwaying into oh
and by the way it’s all your fault
an agent friend and I were discussing
this a book I might do in creativity and
feminism and he said to me you know
Justine the problem with the women who
read your blog is that well you guys
want to be these like audacious wild
Mavericks but you still retain these
traces of memories of when acting like
that might get you burned at the stake
and I thought to myself well maybe he
has a point and then I thought wait wait
hold up and I said to him you know the
women in my audience well we’ve spent
part if not most if not all of our lives
trying to amputate those parts of
ourselves it did not fit you know we’ve
tried to be pleasing and we’ve tried to
do what’s expected and we suck at it and
we eventually reach a point where we
realize that we are so depressed or
stuck or numb doubt that the only way to
save ourselves is to figure out how to
be ourselves on purpose the word
spinster originally referred to a woman
usually a young woman who are under
living spinning or weaving or as a
seamstress of course over time it became
a derogatory term that was used to refer
to a woman who could not land the
husband and had to rely on the largesse
of male relatives because she had no
household ever owned so she was pushed
to the edge of society if she did not
fall out of that society altogether
with the edge can be a very interesting
place to be I mean it can be lonely and
painful and sometimes dangerous and I
don’t mean to underplay any of that but
it’s also the place where something is
in the process of turning into something
else
revolution enters at the edges and so
some of these women who did not have to
Center their lives on housework or
serving the needs of men and children
well they could write and they did they
could write seriously and they did they
could become Jane Austen Emily Dickinson
the Bronte sisters one of the leading
novelist of the Victorian era was a
writer named George Eliot also
considered to be one of the greatest
writers in English language George’s
real name was Mary Ann Evans and she
grew up as a bit of an odd doc because
she was a brilliant girl in an age when
brilliant girl was an oxymoron and she
was considered to be ugly you know she
was considered to be unmarriageable and
she never did marry but when she hit
middle age she shacked up with this
younger guy who really adored her and
they lived together at wedlock for the
rest of their lives and society of
course was like shocked and appalled and
they would not invite Mary Ann to join
them in any of their reindeer games
so I don’t the edge she created her own
circle you know of free thinkers and
Bohemians and some of the leading
intellectuals of the day and she wrote
the seven novels that made her name see
Mary Ann Evans was a fallen woman but
George Eliot was a literary genius the
dancer and choreographer Martha Graham
who founded modern dance has a famous
quote about creativity that I just love
and it goes like this
there is a vitality a life force and
energy a quickening it translates
through you into action
and because there is only one of you in
all of time it is unique if you block it
it will not exist in any other medium
and it will be lost the world will not
have it it is not your business to
determine if it is good or if it is
valuable or how it compares to any other
expression it is your business to keep
it yours clearly and directly and to
keep the channel open you do not even
have to believe in yourself and your
work you just have to stay open and
aware to the urges that motivate you and
keep the channel open and part of the
work of keeping the channel open is to
show up day after day after day at a
room of your own or a corner of your own
where you can pursue your obsessions the
mythologists in the academic joseph
campbell refer to this as your bliss
station and he recommended that
everybody have one because it’s at your
bliss station where you can discover who
you are is creative and you can get on
and you could stay on the road to
mastery because it’s when you get really
good at whatever it is that you do that
the meaning you create for yourself
resonates with the inner lives of others
the best stories are the ones that we
surface from the dark I was in San
Francisco recently and a friend of mine
called around 1 o’clock in the morning
and you live just up the street and he
told me that a friend of ours a mutual
friend of ours had just dropped by with
his new girlfriend Courtney Love and did
I want to come hang out and so I was
like yeah and the Courtney had a band
whole and they did this album lived
through this which I listened to over
and over in college and it got me
through a difficult time and I wanted to
tell Courtney this so I meet my friend
and as we’re going up in the elevator he
says to me very casually
you know Courtney was just telling us
that she spent the last twenty years
listening to the women of Generation X
tell her how much they loved her album
lived through this and they’ve been
listening to it over and over and over
then it got them through a difficult
time and she’s really sick of hearing
this so I thought oh good to know
so we talked about Britney instead but I
believe that there are people who learn
how to carry the sins of a village who
learned how to interrogate that darkness
instead of being crushed by it and they
are the ones who become the
truth-tellers in the provocateurs the
artists and the visionaries of the
culture and they use their art and their
magic and their tech and their intellect
to not only show us who we are in a way
that we can understand and accept but
also who we can be they create new
tribes and new worlds that call their
people home during my years with Ilan I
became familiar with a distinct and
deeply tribal mentality known as
Engineers and once when my dad came to
visit I was taking him to see Ilan at
elands first company as if to and we
were crossing through the office park
and we saw these lanky dudes and jeans
and t-shirts and they were racing these
remote-controlled contraptions around
the parking lot and banging them into
cars and my dad said to me Oh are these
the children of the engineers and I said
no dad these are the engineers and when
ela and I would travel and we had to
fill out those um forums of customs that
wanted to know your occupation you know
Ellen never wrote down CEO or king of
the world or studly international
playboy he wrote engineer and he wore
jeans and t-shirts to work and whenever
we went shopping for clothes or later
consulted with the stylist whose name
was Martin he would say no no you don’t
understand I can’t
look cool or hip because I have to look
like an engineer and one of the things
that he told me although I don’t know if
it says true now as it was back then was
that engineers could not quite figure
out why it was that the suits made the
big money when it was the engineers who
actually built the stuff that they were
selling and meanwhile the suits would
listen to the engineers talk and they
would have no idea what they were saying
and that’s when I realized that Elon was
somebody who had learned to speak both
languages and he could move between the
tribes because he was an engineer in a
suit and he brought together world and
this is what an engineer does I mean
this is what a visionary does it not
only creates something new but they
become the living embodiment of it they
don’t just tell us a new story
they are that story and soon they don’t
even have to open up their mouths they
just walk into the room I recently read
a profile on Ilan and he’s quoted as
saying something to a friend and this
happened during the time we were still
married together and he said something
to this friend that he never said to me
and he was saying that he was prepared
to sacrifice everything his entire
fortune to get a rocket into orbit and
he said I don’t care if Justine and the
kids and I end up living in Justine’s
parents basement I’m gonna make this
happen and so I read this and I kind of
wanted to go back in time and go up to
him and take him by the shoulders and
look him very seriously in the eyes and
say have you seen my parents basement so
I’d like to wrap up by getting to
Ellen’s advice which is to always go
beyond memorizing formulas passing tests
to always go deep into the underlying
principles ever subject to track any
problem down to the root cause bury it
in the dirt in the dark and I would add
to that and say be brave enough be bold
enough
and be insane enough to see things more
completely more vividly more fully than
everybody else around you and refuse to
look away from what you see and what you
know even if people want to burn you at
the stake because visionaries they take
all that passion and their badass
personalities and their mad skills and
the mastery of their chosen subject
matter and they use it to put themselves
on the line unlike anybody else you’ll
ever meet and it’s this that allows them
to open up windows and to another deeper
reality in which transformation is
possible and things of Awe happen on a
regular basis because in the beginning
we don’t trust them because we think
they’re crazy but by the end we trust
them because we know they’re crazy
they’re crazy enough to accomplish
anything and risk it all in order to
bring us something new to believe in
they might make lousy husbands and
terrible wives they might be the friend
who never sends you a birthday present
and forgets to show up for coffee but
they bring light to the dark and they
show us the universe keep the channel
open thank you
[Music]
you
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