Walter Isaacson is an author of biographies on Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, Leonardo da Vinci, and many others. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:

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Transcript: https://lexfridman.com/walter-isaacson-transcript



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OUTLINE:

Here's the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time.

(00:00) - Introduction

(10:42) - Difficult childhood

(27:47) - Jennifer Doudna

(30:44) - Einstein

(36:02) - Tesla

(53:07) - Elon Musk's humor

(57:17) - Steve Jobs' cruelty

(1:00:41) - Twitter

(1:12:50) - Firing

(1:15:35) - Hiring

(1:24:38) - Time management

(1:32:22) - Groups vs individuals

(1:36:08) - Mortality

(1:39:40) - How to write

(2:00:38) - Love & relationships

(2:05:33) - Advice for young people

The following is a conversation with Walter Isaacson, 1 of the greatest biography writers ever, having written incredible books on Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, Leonardo da Vinci, Jennifer Doudna, Benjamin Franklin, Henry Kissinger, and now a new 1 on Elon Musk.

Walter is a truly special writer, thinker, observer, and human being.

I highly recommend people read his new book on Elon.

I'm sure there will be short-term controversy, but in the long-term, I think it will inspire millions of young people, especially with difficult childhoods, with hardship in their surroundings or in their own minds, to take on the hardest problems in the world and to build solutions to those problems, no matter how impossible the odds.

In this conversation, Walter and I cover all of his books and use personal stories from them to speak to the bigger principles of striving for greatness in science, in tech, engineering, art, politics, and life.

There are many things in the new Elon book that I felt are best saved for when I speak to Elon directly again on this podcast, which will be soon enough.

Perhaps it's also good to mention here that my friendships, like with Elon, nor any other influence like money, access, fame, power, will ever result in me sacrificing my integrity.

I do like to celebrate the good in people.

But I also like to call people out on their bullshit.

If I fail, I fail due to a lack of skill, not a lack of integrity.

And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor.

It's the best way to support this podcast.

We got Masterclass for learning, NetSuite for business stuff, BetterHelp for mental health, ExpressVPN for security and privacy, and Shopify for, well, buying and selling whatever on the internet.

Also, if you want to work with our team, our amazing team, we're always hiring, go to lexfriedman.com slash hiring.

I try to make these interesting, but if you must skip them, friends, please still check out our sponsors.

This show is brought to you by Masterclass.

You can pay just a little bit of money and learn from the best people in the world at doing whatever it is they do.

Another is by reading, or watching Other people give tutorials on how to do the thing.

And the other is to observe the people that do the thing at a world-class level, or who are the best in the world at doing that thing.

I think, oh, while it's not the only thing you should be doing, that is as good as it gets.

That's the advice I've always been given, and I've given.

1 of the best ways to excel in life, and not in some shallow way, but in a deep way, is to find the people in this world who you want to become and do anything you can to work with them, to be around them, to learn from them.

And not because they sit down and give their time to you to teach, but by just being in their presence and observing how they work, and then giving everything you can to contribute to that effort, to that mission, to sort of the passion that pulls them and that drives them.

In some sense, watching a masterclass is a way of doing that.

I'm a big fan of watching not just teachers, but the doers in this world.

I can go on, the list is incredible, from Chris Hadfield to Will Wright, man, I should really talk to Will Wright.

Carlos Santana, and I should talk to Carlos Santana.

And not just talk, talking's not enough, friends.

Anyway, get unlimited access to every Masterclass and get 15% off an annual membership at masterclass.com slash LexPod.

This show is also brought to you by NetSuite, an all-in-one cloud business management system.

Time flies, friends, when you're having fun.

And NetSuite has been having a whole lot of fun helping people run their business as well.

In fact, it's 36,000 companies have upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle.

They get together, a bunch of people get together.

There's like a boss and there's employees and they have lunches and meetings.

Some of them are horribly drowning in bureaucracy.

Some of them resist and fight that bureaucracy and actually get something done.

And that's that little struggle of humanity in these little pockets of dreams and sweat and labor and just reaching for the stars with big goals and small goals.

With Elon, with Steve Jobs, and all throughout history with Da Vinci, striving all kinds of different ways.

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This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P, help.

In this episode with Walter, we'll talk quite a bit about demons.

Both demons in Diablo, I think we'll allude to that, and demons inside our own mind.

They're, in some sense, reminders of how difficult life can be.

How much struggle, big and small, all of us can experience and that struggle can break us or it can strengthen us.

That's the choice all of us make through hardship.

And some of the greatest men and women in the world in the history of the world have been defined in their early days by the struggle and the overcoming of that struggle.

Talking in general, but therapy which is systematic, rigorous exploration of the human mind through the talking method.

I think should be 1 of the tools for that, for turning the demons into productive demons versus destructive demons.

BetterHelp is super accessible and easy, so definitely something you should try.

You can check them out at betterhelp.com slash flex and save on your first month.

This show is also brought to you by ExpressVPN.

I use them to protect my privacy on the internet.

It's like a warm blanket for me of happiness that fights off the monsters that hide in the closet of our childhoods.

I never actually had monsters in the closet because I grew up in a tiny place.

I'm not sure where I'm getting with that, but there is a sense of happiness that I associate with ExpressVPN because through some of the more difficult moments of my life, that was a piece of software that's running on my computer and it just works.

It's silly how these little pieces of software can just bring a little bit of comfort to you.

For a long time Emacs as an IDE was that.

I would open up the Emacs editor with a bunch of windows open, black background, white text, and I would see all that code laid out before me.

It was an escape from the hardness of life.

In a simpler way, ExpressVPN is kind of like that.

Across different operating systems, Linux included, it works everywhere.

And you can go check it out yourself at expressvpn.com slash logspot for an extra 3 months free.

This show is also brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store that brings your ideas to life and gives you tools to manage day-to-day operations.

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You can go there by clicking on, I think, lexfriedman.com slash store, and they'll take you there.

In this case, I'm just selling t-shirts, but it was so easy to go from 0 to hero, although I never quite got to hero, but get the store set up, super easy.

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To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

And now, dear friends, here's Walter Isaacson.

♪♪♪ What is the role of a difficult childhood in the lives of great men and women, great minds.

Is that a requirement, is it a catalyst, or is it just a simple coincidence of fate?

Some people with happy childhoods do quite well.

But It certainly is true that a lot of really driven people are driven because they're harnessing the demons of their childhood.

Even Barack Obama's sentence in his memoirs, which is I think every successful man is either trying to live up to the expectations of his father or live down the sins of his father.

And for Elon, it's especially true because he had both a violent and difficult childhood and a very psychologically problematic father.

He's got those demons dancing around in his head And by harnessing them, it's part of the reason that he does riskier, more adventurous, wilder things than maybe I would ever do.

You've written that Elon talked about his father and that at times it felt like mental torture,

the interaction with him during his childhood.

Can you describe some of the things you've learned?

Yeah, well, Elon and Kimball would tell me that, for example, when Elon got bullied on the playground and 1 day was pushed down some concrete steps and had his face pummeled so badly that Kimball said, I couldn't really recognize him.

And he was in the hospital for almost a week.

But when he came home, Elon had to stand in front of his father, and his father berated him for more than an hour and said he was stupid and took the side of the person who had beaten him.

That's probably 1 of the more traumatic events of Elon's life.

Yes, and there's also Veld School, which is a sort of paramilitary camp that young South African boys got sent to.

He has very bad at picking up social cues and emotional cues.

And so he gets traumatized at a camp like that.

But the second time he went, he'd gotten bigger.

He had shot up to almost 6 feet and he learned a little bit of Judo and he realized that if he was getting beaten up, it might hurt him but he would just punch the person in the nose as hard as possible.

So that sense of always punching back has also been ingrained in Elon.

I spent a lot of time talking to Errol Musk, his father.

Elon doesn't talk to Errol Musk anymore, his father, nor does Kimball, it's been years.

And Errol doesn't even have Elon's email, So a lot of times Errol would be sending me emails.

And Errol had 1 of those Jekyll and Hyde personalities.

He was a great mind of engineering and especially material science.

Knew how to build a wilderness camp in South Africa using mica and how it would not conduct the heat, but he also would go into these dark periods in which he would just be psychologically abusive.

And of course, Maymusk says to me, his mother, who divorced Errol early on, said, the danger for Elon is that he becomes his father.

And every now and then, you've been with him so much, Lex, and you know him well, he'll even talk to you about the demons, about Diablo dancing in his head.

I mean, he gets it, he's self-aware, but you've probably seen him at times where those demons take over and he goes really dark and really quiet.

And Grimes says, you know, I can tell a minute or 2 in advance when demon mode's about to happen.

I was, you know, here at Austin, wanted dinner with a group.

And you could tell suddenly something had triggered him and he was gonna go dark.

I've watched it in meetings where somebody will say, we can't make that part for less than $200 or no, that's wrong.

And then he snaps out of it, as you know that too, the huge snap out where suddenly he's showing you a Monty Python skit on his phone and he's joking about things.

So I think coming out of the childhood, There were just many facets, maybe even many personalities.

The engineering mode, the silly mode, the charismatic mode, the visionary mode, but also the demon and dark mode.

A quote you cited about Elon really stood out to me.

I forget who it was from, but inside the man, he's still there as a child, the child standing in front of his dad.

That was Tallulah, his second wife, and she's great.

She's an English actress, they've been married twice actually, and Tallulah said, that's just him from his childhood, He's a drama addict.

And I asked why, and he said, and Tallulah said, you know, for him, Love and family are kind of associated with those psychological torments, and in many ways, he'll channel.

I mean, Tallulah would be with him in 2008 when the company was going bankrupt, whatever it may have been, or later, and he would be so stressed he would vomit, and then he would channel things that his father had said, use phrases his father had said to him, and so she told me, deep inside the man is this man-child still standing in front of his father?

To what degree is that true for many of us, do you think?

I think it's true, but in many different ways.

I'll say something personal, which is I was blessed, and perhaps it's a bit of a downside too, with the fact that I had the greatest father you could ever imagine, and mother.

They were the kindest people you'd ever wanna meet.

I grew up in a magical place in New Orleans.

My dad was an engineer, an electrical engineer, And he was always kind.

Perhaps I'm not quite as driven or as crazed, I don't have to prove things.

So I get to write about Elon Musk, I get to write about Einstein or Steve Jobs or Leonardo da Vinci, who as you know was totally torn by demons and had different difficult childhood situations, not even legitimized by his father.

So sometimes those of us who are lucky enough to have really gentle, sweet childhood, we grow up with fewer demons, but we grow up with fewer drives, and we end up maybe being Boswell and not being Dr.

We end up being the observer, not being the doer.

And so I always respect those who are in the arena.

You don't see yourself as a man in the arena.

I've had a gentle, sweet career, and I've got to cover really interesting people.

But I've never shot off a rocket that might someday get to Mars.

I've never moved us into the air of electric vehicles.

I've never stayed up all night on the factory floor.

I don't have quite those, either the drives or the addiction to risk.

Me, if I see something that's risky, I spend some time calculating, okay, upside, downside here.

But that's another reason that people like Elon Musk get stuff done and

people like me write about the Elon Musks.

1 other aspect of this, given a difficult childhood, whether it's Elon or Da Vinci, I wonder if there's some wisdom, some advice almost that you can draw, that you can give to people with difficult childhoods.

I think all of us have demons, even those of us who grew up in a magical part of New Orleans with sweet parents.

And rule 1 in life is harness your demons.

Know that you're ambitious or not ambitious, or you're lazy or whatever.

Leonardo da Vinci knew he was a procrastinator.

I think it's useful to know what's eating at you, know how to harness it, Also know what you're good at.

I'm a little bit more like Kimball Musk than Elon.

Maybe got over endowed with the empathy gene.

Well, it means that I was okay when I ran Time Magazine.

It was a group of about 150 people on the editorial floors and I knew them all and we had a jolly time.

When I went to CNN, I was not very good at being a manager or an executive of an organization.

I cared a little bit too much that people didn't get annoyed at me or mad at me.

And Elon said that about John McNeil, for example, who was president of Tesla.

It's in the book, I talked to John McNeil a long time, and he says, you know, Elon just would fire people, be really rough on people.

He didn't have the empathy for the people in front of him.

He cared more about pleasing the people in front of him than pleasing the entire enterprise or getting things done.

Being over-endowed with a desire to please people can make you less tough of a manager.

And that doesn't mean there aren't great people who are over-endowed.

Ben Franklin, over-endowed with the desire to please people.

The worst criticism of him from John Adams and others was that he was insinuating, which kind of meant he was always trying to get people to like him.

When they can't figure out the big state, little state issue at the

Constitutional Convention, when they can't figure out the big state, little state

issue at the Constitutional Convention, when they can't figure out the Treaty of Paris, whatever it is, he brings people together and that is his superpower.

So to get back to the lessons you asked, and the first was harness your demons.

The second is to know your strengths and your superpower.

My superpower is definitely not being a tough manager.

After running CNN for a while, I said, okay, I think I've proven I don't really enjoy this or know how to do this well.

Yeah, I think I have the talent to observe people really closely, to write about it in a straight, but I hope interesting narrative style.

It's totally different from running an organization.

It took me until 3 years of running CNN that I realized I'm not cut to be an executive in a really high intense situations.

Elon Musk is cut to be an executive in highly intense situations.

So much so that when things get less intense, when they actually are making enough cars and rockets are going up and landing, he thinks of something else, so he can surge and have more intensity.

He's addicted to intensity, and that's his superpower, which is a lot greater than the superpower of being a good observer.

But I think also, to build on that, it's not just addiction to risk and drama.

So I would say it's an empathy towards people in the big picture.

More than the empathy towards the 3 or 4 humans who might be sitting in the conference room with you.

You see it, Bill Gates, Larry Summers, Elon Musk.

They always have empathy for these great goals of humanity and at times they can be clueless about the emotions of the people in front of them, or callous sometimes.

Musk, as you said, is driven by mission more than any person I've ever seen.

And it's not only mission, it's like cosmic missions.

1 is to make humans a space-faring civilization, make us multi-planetary, or get us to Mars.

Number 2 is to bring us into the era of sustainable energy to bring us into the era of electric vehicles and solar roofs and battery packs.

And third is to make sure that artificial intelligence is safe and is aligned with human values.

And every now and then I'd talk to him and we'd be talking about Starlink satellites or whatever, or he would be pushing the people in front of him at SpaceX, and saying, if you do this, we'll never get to Mars in our lifetime.

And then he would give the lecture how important it was for human consciousness to get to Mars in our lifetime.

And I'm thinking, okay, this is the pep talk of somebody trying to inspire a team, or maybe it's a type of pontification you do on a podcast, but on like the 20th time I watched him, I realized, okay, I believe it.

He is frustrated and angry that because of this particular minor engineering decision, the big mission is not going to be accomplished.

It's not a pep talk, it's a literal frustration.

And impatience, a frustration, and it's also just probably the most deeply ingrained thing in him is his mission.

He joked at 1 point to me about how much he loved reading comics as a kid, and he said, all the people in the comic books, they're trying to save the world but they're wearing their underpants on the outside and they look ridiculous.

And then he paused and said, but they are trying to save the world.

And whether it's Starlink in Ukraine or Starship going to Mars or trying to get a global new Tesla.

I think he's got this epic sense of the role he's gonna play in helping humanity on big things.

And like the characters in the comic books, it's sometimes ridiculous, but it also is sometimes true.

When I was reading this part of the book, I was thinking of all the young people who are struggling in this way, and I think a lot of people are in different ways, whether they grow up without a father, whether they grow up with physical, emotional, mental abuse, or demons of any kind, as you talked about.

And it's really painful to read, but also really damn inspiring.

That if you sort of walk side by side with those demons, if you don't let that pain break you, or somehow channel it, if you can put it this way, that you can achieve, you can do great things in this world.

Well, that's an epic view of why we write biography, which is more epic than I had even thought of.

So I say thank you, because in some ways what you're trying to do is say, okay, I mean, Leonardo, you talk about being a misfit, he's born illegitimate in the village of Vinci, and he's gay, and he's left-handed, and he's distracted, and his father won't legitimize him.

And then he wanders off to the town of Florence, and he becomes the greatest artist and engineer of that part of the Renaissance.

Jennifer Doudna, the gene editing pioneer who discovers, helps discover CRISPR, gene editing tool, which my book, The Codebreaker, She grew up feeling like a misfit, you know, in Hawaii, in a Polynesian village, being the only white person, and also trying to live up to a father who pushed her.

So if people can read the books, and I should've said about Jennifer Dowden, my point was that she was told by her school guidance counselor, no, girls don't do science.

See all Lex Fridman Podcast transcripts on Applepodcasts

#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin