Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin | Lex Fridman Podcast #395

I hope with my books. I'm saying this isn't a how to guide, but this is somebody you can walk alongside. You can see Einstein growing up Jewish in Germany. You can see Jennifer Doudna growing up or as an outsider, or Leonardo da Vinci or Elon Musk in really violent South Africa with a psychologically difficult father and and getting off the train when he goes to anti apartheid concert with his brother and there's a man with a knife sticking out of his head and they step into the pool of blood and it's sticky on their souls. This causes scars that last the rest of your life. And the question is not how do you avoid getting scarred, it's how do you deal with it.

The following is a conversation with Walter Isaacson, one 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 one on Elon Musk. We talked for hours, on and off the mic. I'm sure we'll talk many more times. 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. Ever. I do like to celebrate the good in people, to empathize and to understand. But I also like to call people out on their bullshit with respect and with compassion. If I fail, I. I fail due to a lack of skill, not a lack of integrity. I'll work hard to improve. This is the Lex Friedman podcast.

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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?

Well, it's not a requirement some people with happy childhood to 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 one 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 one 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. And at one point, he was scrawny. He has very bad at picking up social cues and emotional cues. He talks about being Asperger's. 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 six 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 El 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 will be sending me emails. And Errol had one 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, Maye Musk says to me, his mother, who divorced Darrell 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 two in advance when demon mode's about to happen and. And he'll go a bit dark. I was here at Austin, wanted dinner with a group, and you could tell suddenly something had triggered him and he was going to go dark. I've watched it at meetings where somebody will say, we can't make that part for less than $200 or no, that's wrong, and he'll berate them. And then he steps out of it, as you know that too. The huge snap out where suddenly he's showing you Monty Python skit on his phone and he's joking about things. So I think 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 in 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. Kimball says that as well. And I asked why. And Tallulah said, 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 or 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 want to 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 childhoods, we grow up with fewer demons, but we grow up with fewer drives. And we end up maybe being Boswell and not being Dr. Johnson. We end up being the observer, not being the doer. And so I always respect those who are in the arena. I don't, you know, 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 era 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. I mean, Elon's addicted to risk. He's addicted to adventure. 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.

One 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 we all have demons. And rule one 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 eaten at you, know how to harness it, also know what you're good at. I'll take Musk as another example. I'm a little bit more like Kimbal Musk than Elon. I maybe got over endowed with the empathy gene. And what does that mean? Well, it means that I was okay when I ran Time magazine. It was a group 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 Elon just would fire people, be really rough on people. He didn't have the empathy for the people in front of him. And Elon says, yeah, that's right. And John McNeil couldn't fire people. 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. But that turned out to be a good thing. 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. Do I have other talents? 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. That's a power. It's totally different from running an organization. It took me until three years of running CNN that I realized I'm not cut to be an executive in a really high intense situation. Elon Musk is cut to be an executive in highly intense situation. 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 like risk and drama. There is always a big mission above it. So I would say it's an empathy towards people in the big picture.

It's an empathy towards humanity more than the empathy towards the three or four humans who might be sitting in the conference room with you. And that's a big deal. You see that in a lot of people. You see it Bill Gates or 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 ever seen. And it's not only mission, it's like cosmic missions, Meaning he's got three really big missions. One is to make humans a space faring civilization, make us multi planetary or get us to Mars. Number two 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 them 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 the type of pontification you do on a podcast. But on like the 20th time I watch them, I realized, okay, I believe it. He actually is driven by this.

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, an impatience, a frustration. And it's also just probably the most deeply ingrained thing in him is his mission. He joked at one 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 going to 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 the early Renaissance of that part of the Renaissance. I hope this book inspires Jennifer Doudna, the gene editing pioneer who discovers helps discover CRISPR gene editing tool which my book the Code Breaker. She grew up feeling like a misfit 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 have said about Jennifer Doubt. And my point was that she was told by her school guidance counselor, no, girls don't do science. You know, science is not for girls. You're not going to do math or science. And so it pushes her to say, all right, I'm going to do math and science.

Just to interrupt real quick, but Jennifer Downer, you've written an amazing book about her. Nobel prize winner CRISPR developer. Just incredible. One of the great scientists in the 21st century, right?

And I'm talking about when Jennifer Doudna was young and she felt really, really out of place like you and me and a lot of People, when they feel in that way they read books, they go into, they curl up with the book. So her father drops a book on her bed called the Double Helix, the book by James Watson on the discovery of the structure of DNA by him and Rosalind Franklin and Francis Crick. And she realizes, oh my God, girls can become scientists. My school guidance counselor is wrong. So I think books like she read this book. And even if it's a comic books like Elon Musk read books can sometimes inspire you. And every one of my books is about people who were totally innovative, who weren't just smart because none of us are going to be able to match Einstein and mental processing power. But we can be as curious as he was and creative and think out of the box the way he did, or Steve Jobs put it, think different. And so I hope with my books, I'm saying this isn't a how to guide, but this is somebody you can walk alongside. You can see Einstein growing up Jewish in Germany. You can see Jennifer Doudna growing up, or as an outsider, or Leonardo da Vinci or Elon Musk in really violent South Africa with a psychologically difficult father and getting off the train when he goes to anti apartheid concert with his brother and there's a man with a knife sticking out of his head and they step into the pool of blood and it's sticky on their souls. This causes scars that last the rest of your life. And the question is not how do you avoid getting scarred, it's how do you deal with it?

Einstein too. One of my. It's hard to pick my favorite of your biographies, but Einstein, you really paint a picture of another. I don't want to call him a misfit, but a person who doesn't necessarily have a standard trajectory through life of success, that's extremely inspiring. I don't know exactly what question to ask. There's a million.

Well, I'll talk about the misfit for a second because we talked about Leonardo being that way. Einstein's Jewish in Germany, at a time when it starts getting difficult, he's slow in learning how to talk and he's a visual thinker. So he's always daydreaming and imagining things. The first time he applies to the Zurich Polytech because he runs away from the German education system because it's too much learning by rote, he gets rejected by the Zurich Polytech. Now it's the second best school in Zurich and they're rejecting Einstein. I tried to find but couldn't the name of the admissions Counselor at the Zurich Polyge. You rejected hindsight. And then he doesn't finish in the top half of his class. And once he does and he goes to graduate school, they don't accept his dissertation, so he can't get a job, he's not teaching it. He even tries about 14 different high schools at gymnasium to get a job and they won't take him. So he's a third class examiner in the Swiss patent office in 1905, third class because they've rejected his doctoral dissertation. And so he can't be second class or first class because he doesn't have a doctoral degree. And yet he's sitting there on the stool in the patent office in 1905 and writes three papers that totally transform science. And if you're thinking about being misunderstood or unappreciated, in 1906, he's still a third class patent, in 1907 he still is. It takes until 1909 before people realize that this notion of the theory of relativity might be correct and it might upend all of Newtonian physics.

How is it possible for three of the greatest papers in the history of science to be written in one year by this one person? Is there some insights, wisdoms you draw?

Plus he had a day job as a patent examiner and there's really three papers. But there's also an addendum, because once you figure out quantum theory and then you figure out relativity and you're understanding Maxwell's equations and the speed of light, he does a little addendum that's the most famous equation in all of physics, which is E equals MC squared. So it's a pretty good year. It partly starts because he's a visual thinker and I think it was helpful that he was at the patent office rather than being the acolyte of some professor at the academy where he was supposed to follow the rules. And so the patent office, they're doing devices to synchronize clocks because the Swiss have just gone on standard time zones. And Swiss people, as you know, tend to be rather Swiss. They care if it strikes the hour in Basel, it should do the same and burn at the exact incident. So you have to send a light signal between two distant clocks. And he's visualizing what's it look like to ride alongside a light beam. He says, well, if you catch up with it, if you go almost as fast, it'll look stationary. But Maxwell's equations don't allow for that. And he said it was making my palms sweat that I was so worried. And so he finally figures out, because he's looking at these devices to synchronize clocks, that if you're traveling really, really fast, what looks synchronous to you or synchronized to you is different than for somebody traveling really fast in the other direction. And he makes the mental leap that time, that the speed of light's always constant, but time is relative depending on your state of motion. So it was that type of out of the box thinking those leaps that made 1905 his miracle year. Likewise with Musk. I mean, after General Motors and Ford, everybody gives up on electric vehicles to just say, I know how we're going to have a path to change the entire trajectory of the world into the era of electric vehicles. And then when he comes back from Russia, where he tried to buy a little rocket ship so he could send a experimental greenhouse to Mars and they were poking fun of him and actually spit on him at one point in a drunken lunch. This is very fortuitous because on the ride back home, on the plane, on the Delta Airlines flight, he's like doing the calculations of how much materials, how much metal, how much fuel, how much would it really cost? And so he's visualizing things that other people would just say is impossible. It's what Steve Jobs friends called the reality distortion field. And it drove people crazy, it drove them mad, but it also drove them to do things they didn't think they would be able to do.

You said visual thinking. I wonder if you've seen parallels of the different styles and kinds of thinking that operate the minds of these people. So is there parallels you see between Elon, Steve Jobs, Einstein, da Vinci, specifically in how they think?

I think they were all visual thinkers, perhaps coming from slight handicaps as children, meaning Leonardo was left handed and a little bit dyslectic, I think. And certainly Einstein had Echolia. He would repeat things. He was slow in learning to talk. So I think visualizing helps a lot. And with Musk, I see it all the time when I'm walking the factory lines with him or in product development where he'll look at say the heat shield under the Raptor engine of a starship booster and he'll say, why does it have to be this way? Couldn't we trim it this way or make it or even get rid of this part of it? And he can visualize the material science. There's small anecdotes in my book, but at one point he's on the Tesla line and they're trying to get 5,000 cars a week in 2018, it's a life or death situation. And he's looking at the machines that are bolting something to the chassis. And he insists that Drew Baglini. Not Drew, Lars Moravy, one of his great lieutenants, come and they have to summon him. And he says, why are there six bolts here? And Lars and others explained, well, for the crash test or anything else, the pressure would be in this way, so you have to. And they were, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And he said, no, if you visualize it, you'll see if there's a crash, the force would go this way and that way, and it could be done with four bolts. Now, that sounds risky. And they go test it and they engineer it, but it turns out to be right. I know that seems minor, but I could give you 500 of those. Where in any given day, he's visualizing the physics of an engineering or manufacturing problem. That sounds pretty mundane, but for me, if you say, what makes him special? There's a mission driven thing. I give you a lot of reasons, but one of the reasons is he cares not just about the design of the product, but visualizing the manufacturing of the product, the machine that makes the machine. And that's what we failed to do in America for the past 40 years. We outsourced so much manufacturing. I don't think you can be a good innovator if you don't know how to make the stuff you're designing. And that's why Musk puts his designer's desk right next to the assembly lines in the factories, so that they have to visualize what they drew as it becomes the physical object.

So understanding everything from the physics all the way up to the software, it's like end to end.

Well, having.