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

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: - MasterClass: https://masterclass.com/lexpod to get 15% off - NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/lex to get fre

I hope with my books I’m saying uh 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 doudner growing up or as an outsider or a Leonardo da Vinci or Elon Musk you know 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 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 you know scars that last the rest of your life and the question is not how do you avoid getting scarred it’s you know 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 with respect and with compassion if I fail I fail due to a lack of skill not a lack of Integrity I work hard to improve this is the Lex Friedman podcast 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 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 uh sentence and his Memoirs which is I think every successful man is either trying to live up to the expectations of 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 uh dancing around in his head and by harnessing them it’s part of the reason that he does riskier more adventurous Wilder things and maybe I would ever do you’ve written that Elon talked about his father and that at times it felt like mental torture the 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 when 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 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 you know 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 uh traumatized at a camp like that but the second time 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 he might 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 Arrow musk his father Elon done talked to Meryl musk anymore his father nor does Kimball it’s been years and uh Errol doesn’t even have elon’s email so a lot of times Arrow will be sending me emails and arrow had one of those Jekyll and Hyde personalities he was you know a great mind of engineering and especially Material Science I knew how to build a Wilderness Camp in South Africa using Micah 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 May musk says to me the his mother who divorced Daryl 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 LAX and you know him well he’ll even talk to you about the demons about Diablo dancing in his head I mean he 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 uh Grimes says you know I can tell a minute or two in advance when demon Mode’s about to happen and he’ll go a bit dark I was you know 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 in 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 the huge snap out where suddenly he’s showing you Monty pythons get on his phone he’s joking about things so I think coming out of the childhood there were just mini facets maybe even many personalities the engineering mode the silly mode the charismatic mode the Visionary mode but also the demon in dark mode I’ll quote you cited about elon’s really stood out to me I forget uh who was from but inside the man he’s still there as a child the child’s standing in front of his dad that was Tallulah his second wife and she’s great uh 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 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 back 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 a 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 but the fact I had the greatest father he could ever imagine and mother they were the kindest people you’d ever want to meet I grew