Jul 22, 2026 · 46 min · 16 segments
Hasan sits down with famous biographer, Walter Isaacson, to discuss why biographies are important, why biographies don't tell the whole story, and asks him about some of the psychos he's spent time…
Walter IsaacsonGuest
Hasan MinhajHost
America recently celebrated the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and if your timeline is anything like mine, you saw a deluge, a bukkake of George Washington and Benjamin Franklin greatness porn.
How amazing these guys were, how great these guys were, how without their greatness, America would not be what it is today.
Back in 1840, the influential historian Thomas Carlyle wrote, "The history of what man has accomplished in this world is at bottom the history of the great men.
All things that we see standing accomplished in the world are properly the outer material result of thoughts that dwelt in the great men sent into the world." TLDR, dudes fucking rock.
And this perspective has informed how Americans were taught their history for years.
The history of America was basically the biographies of Christopher Columbus, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, FDR, and JFK.
But if you just read those books, you would probably walk away thinking that civilization was moved forward only by single individuals, and that those individuals weren't assholes.
But there's a whole different approach to history which started becoming more dominant in the 1970s and the 1980s that gives more credit to social and structural forces and collective action, AKA a bunch of people working together to get a desired result to benefit humanity.
So yes, Abraham Lincoln was important to ending slavery, but the abolitionist movement had been working on it since the previous century.
Yes, FDR passed the New Deal, but that was the final chapter of a fight that started decades earlier with farmer protests in the late 1800s and labor activism in the early 1900s.
You could even argue that the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911 was a more important origin story of the New Deal than the election of FDR.
But even if there might be more nuance and complexity to those kinds of historical narratives, there's still a huge temptation to explain history through the influence of powerful people, mainly men.
But is it true? To talk more about this, I sat down with one of the most famous biographers out there right now, Mr.
His books have mostly focused on singular individuals who have made a big impact in the tradition of this great man style of history.
His first book was literally called The Wise Men, and he has written biographies of Henry Kissinger, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and also a woman, biochemist Jennifer Doudna.
America recently celebrated the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and if your timeline is anything like mine, you saw a deluge, a bukkake of George Washington and Benjamin Franklin greatness porn.
How amazing these guys were, how great these guys were, how without their greatness, America would not be what it is today.
Back in 1840, the influential historian Thomas Carlyle wrote, "The history of what man has accomplished in this world is at bottom the history of the great men.
All things that we see standing accomplished in the world are properly the outer material result of thoughts that dwelt in the great men sent into the world." TLDR, dudes fucking rock.
And this perspective has informed how Americans were taught their history for years.
The history of America was basically the biographies of Christopher Columbus, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, FDR, and JFK.
But if you just read those books, you would probably walk away thinking that civilization was moved forward only by single individuals, and that those individuals weren't assholes.
But there's a whole different approach to history which started becoming more dominant in the 1970s and the 1980s that gives more credit to social and structural forces and collective action, AKA a bunch of people working together to get a desired result to benefit humanity.
So yes, Abraham Lincoln was important to ending slavery, but the abolitionist movement had been working on it since the previous century.
Yes, FDR passed the New Deal, but that was the final chapter of a fight that started decades earlier with farmer protests in the late 1800s and labor activism in the early 1900s.
You could even argue that the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911 was a more important origin story of the New Deal than the election of FDR.
But even if there might be more nuance and complexity to those kinds of historical narratives, there's still a huge temptation to explain history through the influence of powerful people, mainly men.
But is it true? To talk more about this, I sat down with one of the most famous biographers out there right now, Mr.
His books have mostly focused on singular individuals who have made a big impact in the tradition of this great man style of history.
His first book was literally called The Wise Men, and he has written biographies of Henry Kissinger, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and also a woman, biochemist Jennifer Doudna.
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