Walter Isaacson Returns (biographer & historian)

Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard

Armchair Umbrella

Comedy, Tv & Film, Music

4.6 • 68.3K Ratings

🗓️ 7 January 2026

⏱️ 119 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Walter Isaacson (The Greatest Sentence Ever Written) is a biographer, historian, and Professor of History at Tulane University. Walter returns to the Armchair Expert to discuss why he embeds himself into the lives of his subjects to write about them, how empathy can get in the way of success, and discovering the secret sauce of Elon Musk. Walter and Dax talk about his interest in people that try to learn as much as possible about everything knowable, the belief that growing up as a misfit can instill the drive seen in innovators of the modern age, and why an understanding of engineering is crucial to the political and philosophical conversations taking place today. Walter explains evaluating truths in the original draft of the Declaration of Independence, the struggle and strategy to create common ground throughout American history, and his assertion as a historian that even heroes have great flaws and villains have backstories.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Wondry Plus subscribers can listen to Armchair Expert early and ad free right now.
0:06.5	Join Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple Podcasts.
0:10.0	Or you can listen for free wherever you get your podcasts.
0:14.2	Welcome, welcome, welcome to armchair expert.
0:16.5	Experts on expert.
0:17.5	I'm Dan Shepard and I'm joined by Monica Isaacson.
0:20.7	Whoa. Recently married to our guest uh walter
0:24.7	isaacson is back we had him on last time to talk about the elon book i believe is that what he's here for
0:30.9	no dowden uh jennifer dowd oh right jennifer downed and then i read the elin one afterwards all to say he's back
0:37.0	with a new book called
0:38.0	the greatest sentence ever written i got to add in case you didn't listen to the first walter
0:42.3	which you should yeah walter in his own right is the most fascinating person and i said this in
0:47.1	the first interview he deserves his own biography because he was the CEO or president of CNN yeah
0:52.7	he has a whole crazy epic career before he was a biography.
0:56.5	I know.
0:57.1	So cool.
0:57.9	His new book is called The Greatest Sentence Ever Written.
1:01.0	And it's about the most powerful sentence in the Declaration of Independence.
1:05.3	And he just breaks it down word by word and how meticulous it was.
1:09.1	It's extremely fascinating.
1:10.2	It's very fascinating. All the compromises that are just within it was. It's extremely fascinating.
1:13.4	All the compromises that are just within this sentence.
	...

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