#121 Walter Isaacson: Curiosity Fuels Creativity

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/19c2f84eeef902b8

What Leonardo Da Vinci had, just like Benjamin Franklin had, just like Steve Jobs had
Was an insatiable curiosity.
And a willingness to be curious about those things that you and I sort of quit noticing after a while.
I looked in Leonardo's notebooks, I was reading through his notebooks, and there's a section on why is the sky blue.
And what amazed me when I saw that in Leonardo's notebooks
was boom. It's in Einstein's notebooks.
He writes, Why is the sky blue?
And we see it as a kid. We're all curious as kids until grown ups say, quit asking so many dumb questions.
But Leonardo teaches us
That to be creative.
All we have to do is nurture that natural curiosity we all have inside of us.
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Walter Isaacson is here today.
He has been the president and CEO of the Aspen Institute.
The chair of CNN.
and the managing editor of Time magazine.
He's also the author of several acclaimed biographies on Einstein, Ben Franklin, Steve Jobs, and Da Vinci.
He's also written The Innovators and most recently The Codebreaker.
Naturally any conversation with someone who has studied and written about so many people will cover a lot of ground, and this one does not disappoint.
We talk about Steve Jobs in great detail, including why the awkward word impute was so important to him.
We talk about Da Vinci and how he wasn't born with a brilliant mind, but developed one.
We talk about Ada Loveless and how she developed the algorithm.
And then we talk about gene editing.
It's time to listen.
And learn.
Let's start at the beginning. You started writing about Ben Franklin and then Einstein and then Steve Jobs and then Da Vinci. What made these lives worth exploring?
You know, when I worked at Time Magazine or was growing up, I knew a lot of smart people, and it suddenly occurred to me that smart people are a dime a dozen and they don't usually amount to much. The real key was being creative, to be able, as Steve Jobs would say, to think different.
Uh and to be innovative.
And so I started looking at for what are the
clues to creativity and innovation. And whether it's Leonardo da Vinci or Ben Franklin or Steve Jobs
These are people who love to see patterns across nature. They were interested in everything you could possibly know. And by seeing those patterns, they made mental leaps that others didn't do.
And so I've never been interested in powerful people necessarily or poets or soldiers. I've been interested in creative thinkers.
What's your method for studying people and telling a story about them?
You know, it's pretty simple. It's chronological. You begin at the beginning
And a lot of historians they don't believe in narrative or chronology, but I grew up in Louisiana.
And I had a mentor here who said that two types of people come out of Louisiana, preachers and storytellers. He said, For heaven's sake, be a storyteller. It's the way the Bible does it. You start with the great lead sentence in the beginning, comma.
And you make it a chronol a chronological narrative. And so all of my books use that as a guiding principle because that's the way we lead our lives. That's the way we learn things. That's the way we
develop our character is step by step, day by day.
One of the things that you do that struck me as surprising is that you print everything out at the end of the night and then you review it in the morning.
We know things look different on paper than they do on the screen.
And when you see it on paper in the next morning
You're able to s
Find those sentences or those phrases
They don't quite track or that read quite
kind of clunkily. You see where the whole thing is cluey in parts.
And so I love reading something on a screen, then I love reading it on paper, and then I love reading it aloud.
Let's explore Steve Jobs for a moment. Jobs early mentor Mike Marcula wrote him a memo in nineteen seventy nine that urged three principles. The first two were empathy and focus.
But the third was an awkward word, impute.
But you said it became one of Job's key doctrines. What does impute mean and how did it
Play in.
It was definitely an awkward word, but impute means what does something signal when you first see it?
What did it imply?
And you know, I remember getting my first iPod.
You know, a thousand songs in my pocket, that's gonna be great.
And as you open the box, it opens up as almost as if it's a Tiffany Jewel box, and they are cradled in it.
is this wonderful object of desire, your first iPod
And it kind of imputes things. It it doesn't just say, Here, you know, cut open the cellophane here.
It just has something magical and even when Steve Jobs did the original Macintosh, he made it so that the boxes that they
Deliver to them in the boxes that you got your Mac in.
had four colour.
And the people there were saying, Wait, that's real expensive to make boxes for a collar. He said, Yes, but we need to impute. We need to impute the fact
That this is going to be an object of delight.
I think we still underappreciate that.
Yeah, I mean you look at all sorts of junky things in our lives from our T V remote controls to the packaging on our products to the way perhaps our computer screens
uh now work. You look at uh
I don't know, Microsoft Teams, it like says it imputes uh
This is going to be a horrible experience. Uh I'm not
user friendly with you.
So I think that, you know, we need to see life
to the eyes of Steve Jobs more often.
And say
What is this signaling to me? How can I make it more user friendly?
It's a quite a contrast from an efficient, hyper focused world where profits come before products, but I think one of the the keys to jobs is understanding that products came before profits.
He said if you make a real if you really focus on making profit
You're gonna cut corners, you're gonna do things, you'll juice up your revenues, you'll cut your costs a little bit, you'll make a profit.
But that way is a path to uh disaster.
He said if you focus on making a really insanely good product
The profits are gonna follow.
Well, your book on jobs is a biography. So many people use it as a manual to achieve something great. What are some of the lessons that we can learn?
From jobs.
Well, I say that we biographers don't write how to books.
I didn't write Ben Franklin to say how to be a diplomat or a leader.
Or how to book uh with Steve Jobs saying how to run a company.
Or for that matter, Jennifer Dowdner, my latest uh hero

You know, these aren't seven secrets to success or seven easy lessons for how to run a company.
In fact, when people would come up to me and they'd say, I used your Steve Jobs book, like Elizabeth Holmes would the person who uh invented uh
Theranos or launch Theranos.
Say, Oh, I use your Steve Jobs as a how to book. I'd go, No, no, no.
It's not a how to book. Don't try this at home.
First of all, there's only one Steve Jobs. There's only one Leonardo Da Vinci. You've got to study a whole lot of lives. You've got to figure out
What's most comfortable for you and how you manage people, how you deal with people? What are your goals? What are your mission? And that comes not from reading
the twelve lessons to this or the
you know, ten secrets to that.
It comes from looking at other people, saying what makes them successful.
Uh what makes them easy to deal with.
What type of attributes do they have?
That you
Aren't going to have
I mean
Even if I wanted to be as successful as Steve Jobs.
I would never
have all those attributes. So I gotta play with the cards that have been dealt with me.
and play to my own strengths. And that's what I try to do in my books.
Is I say I'm telling you about real people here, people made of flesh and blood.
If you want to learn the lessons without understanding the people, good luck to you.
But that's not the way I teach it.
Jobs is famous for his intensity. Where did that come from? And how did you manage to avoid complacency?
Well, he had a real focus to him.
He cared, he had a passion, and
That passion was obsessive. I see it in a lot of people I've written about. There was a playful and obsessive passion in Leonardo Da Vinci. He just wanted to understand everything you could possibly know about all things knowable. When he's doing the Mona Lisa.
He's dissecting the human eye.
To see how light rays hit different parts of the retina, he's dissecting
The muscles and nerves that touch the lips.
To see whether
A muscle that moves the lips also moves the eyebrow, those type of things.
These type of people
Who realize that God is in the details
Those are the people who make great advances, and I put Leonardo in that category. I put
Ben Franklin, Steve Jobs in that category, Jennifer Dowdner, as she's trying to understand the inner workings of molecules and realizes that the structure
of a molecule. The structure
of a piece of guide R and A, the way it twists and folds.
determines how it becomes a key.
To unlock the mysteries of life.
That type of passion about the details
is to me one of the keys to creativity.
I think you just gave a great preview of the rest of this episode. I want to get into all those people, but before we get there, I I still want to continue on the thread of Steve Jobs a little bit because we're talking about sort of the pursuit of perfection and the small details and Jobs was worried about things that nobody would ever see. Like
how it was laid out on the microboard and what was behind the screen that nobody would ever look at.
How did that help him and how do you think that hurt him?
When she was young
He and his father built a fence around the back yard in their house and
Little town in California.
And his father said to the young Steve Jobs, We're gonna make the back of the fence just as beautiful as the front of the fence. And Steve said, Why? Nobody's ever gonna see it.
It's facing scrubland. Nobody's ever gonna know.
And his father said, Yes, but you will know.
And the lesson Steve Jobs took from that.
Is that
You h if you care about beauty, you care even about the beauty of the parts unseen.
And so Steve, whether it was
The circuit board on the original Macintosh.
Or the various uh types of ways that the chip were lined up.
He wanted to make sure that the beauty of the parts unseen showed that you were a real artist. His father said, If you're making a cabinet,
that and the back of it faces the wall, you still use it.

Because that's how you know you're a real artist. So when Steve Jobs and his small team did the original Macintosh
The case was sealed, you couldn't open it up, you couldn't see the circuit board, and yet he decided to make it beautiful and he asked.
the thirty engineers on the team to sign their names onto a whiteboard that they engraved on the inside of the case.
Well nobody would ever see it, nobody would ever know, but their signatures were on the inside of the case.
That made them into real artists.
What moments did you have where you were like, Wow, I had no idea when you were researching Steve.
Oh, I I think that the details of design. I remember walking around the design studio
With him and Johnny I
And they were working on electrical plugs.
For European outlets.
And there were about
Seven different
prototypes that they could use.
And Steve was fondling each one, talking about the chamfers, which is the way uh
Peace curves. And uh
Talking about how it would feel in your hand, how it would delight people.
Now I must admit.
If you ask me about my Mac and you know, uh how it plugged in
I don't
know that I even know what the plug that plugged into the wall, exactly how it's curved, exactly how it's shaped.
But when after Steve
Did that.
I realize
that you have to really care and be passionate about the beauty of design.
And that the design includes the hidden things, the design includes the small things.
It includes the details.
And so I've always tried to be a little bit more aware of why
Say a plug for one of
Piece of equipment.
It's so much cooler than a plug for another piece, and what that says.
About the people who made that product.
Steve saw firsthand uh how money changed people at Apple ha and how a lot of the misfits started to act rich. I think he had a comment about fancy cars and big homes and
How did he keep so grounded throughout
Life and not let money ruin him.
I think it's important for people not to be driven
just by the toys you can buy
I see that in Elon Musk now compared to some other billionaires who
He's not defining himself by the
You know, the amount of houses I think he's uh divesting himself of his houses.
Steve Jobs.
Never had the fanciest mansions and he took quite a long time before he even got furniture for them.
Because he didn't define himself by material object.
Near the end of his life, I asked him, you know, about the meaning of all this.
And he said that he'd learned from his guru in India that life is like a river. And at first you think that
If you're successful, you get to take many things out of the river, products people have made or ideas they've come up with.
We said
eventually in life you realize that it's not what you get to take out of the river, it's what you get to put into the river. He was a very spiritual person, guided by his Zen Buddhist training.
And I think that helped keep them grounded. Not only was he spiritual, he he had a reputation for being hard on people. I think at one point he said, I don't think I run roughshod over people, but if something sucks, I tell them to their face, it's my job to be honest. Have we lost that today?
Well, intellectual honesty is something that can push people, make people a great leader.
is something that's I've been a manager. I've run companies
I know that being really brutal and intellectually honest.
is important. First of all, you motivate'em, you drive them, you let'em know where they're not performing and how they can.
And you make sure that you don't have a team, as Steve Jobs said.
That's filled with B players, you only got A players on the team.
I think we all have to look into ourselves as managers. I was
I I had many failings as a manager when I ran
Time Magazine or CNN.
And one of my failings is I wasn't as comfortable being brutally honest.
Or telling people they suck.
uh as perhaps a stronger manager would have been.
Uh but after a while I realised
All right, I gotta play to the strengths I have. I look at somebody like
Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates, people who've uh run great companies. I look at how uh Jennifer Dowdner forms a lab and a consortium.
to do experiments on gene editing.
And
I say, how do you form teams?
You know, Jennifer Dabner will tell me
I like to make sure everybody meets each other before they join our team and that they all feel that they fit in and everybody feels they fit in. And I said, Well, that's a little different than a Steve Jobs who likes creative tension.
likes to make sure that people are going to
sometimes push back and not just go with the flow. And she said, Yeah, everybody's got their style, but my style is I like collegiality and collaboration.
You can look at Ben Franklin, you know, he's somebody
who was good at forging collaboration
And cooperation, pushing compromise, smoothing over differences. He was definitely not known for intellectual honesty. In fact
Sometimes he was considered being too diplomatic, which is a euphemism for not being all that inf uh intellectually honest.
But in building a team like our founders, you needed passionate people like John and Sam Adams. You needed
People of high rectitude like Washington and smart people like Jefferson and Madison.
But you also needed somebody could be the glue.
And who held people together.
So sometimes pushing people through intellectual honesty and brutality is important if you're going to create the most insanely
great phone or
IPO.
Uh but also sometimes being the person who glues people together and gets them to work in harmony.
That's a talent you need.
So I write about those different talents, whether it's Ben Franklin pulling together the founders, Jennifer Dowdner pulling together a consortium of scientists to fight COVID.
Or Steve Jobs creating the awesome team he created at Apple.
Steve believed that even though we live in a virtual world that physical spaces were the secret hiding in plain sight for creativity. I believe he wrote creativity comes from spontaneous meetings.
From random discussions.
You run into someone, you ask what they're doing, and you say, Wow, and soon you're cooking up all sorts of ideas.
What do you think would be his take on remote work today?
I think that if you look at the coronavirus lockdowns and uh the way we were all sent to our room for a while
Uh we can um
Understand what works well virtually, as many things do, including a lot of unnecessary meetings work.
uh better virtually.
But we also know the importance
Face to face
interactions, actually seeing people.
Especially when it's teamwork.
You can uh do teamwork like in my
Book the Code Breaker.
They're able to work on three continents and different countries
and uh help figure out CRISPR, our gene editing tool.
But when they started off the project
It really helped to be there physically, to be there in person.
To be kicking around ideas in a lab
Over dinner.
And likewise, whether it was Steve Jobs who designed the Pixar headquarters to make sure everybody had to walk through the atrium and bump into people.
and exchange ideas.
to the Apple headquarters.
Physical places tend to have serendipity to them.
They tend to be unscheduled encounters.
they tend to be things where you can actually gauge somebody's
Interests and emotions perhaps better.
And we look at places throughout history that have been cradles of creativity.
And that's sometimes what my books are about.
Why was it
that in the fourteen seventies
Leonardo da Vinci goes.
To uh Florence.
It's a mix of people from all over.
uh the trading world from the arab world with the fall of the ottoman empire
from all over Europe because of the uh strength of the
Florence currency.
Uh, they're all there in Florence. That becomes a cradle of creativity.
Likewise, Silicon Valley becomes a cradle of creativity in the nineteen seventies, and for that matter, Philadelphia in the seventeen seventies.
And this happens because
certain people get attracted.
to places where there's diverse ideas and an energy to them.
And
Doing it on Zoom can sometimes recreate sixty percent of that.
But as a professor at Tulane, you know, here in New Orleans.
I did a lot of my teaching on Zoom.
But I love the fact that the kids were actually on campus.
And that I could meet with them some and now I'm back seeing them and we're just
kicking around things and discussing things. I think Tulane was right.
To do in
person campus.
Even during some of the pandemic
And it showed me how imper how important
these in person encounters are and if you ask the students
And you asked them to compare their experiences to people went to other universities that were shut down.
They'll just tell you how important it was.
To be able to hang around other people.
I like the idea of these pockets of sort of innovation that crop up, whether it's Britain or Florence or Silicon Valley. What what's your hypotheses on why they tend to
Burnout.
Well, they tend to burn out sometimes.
When the tolerance and the diversity that distinguish, say Florence in the fourteen seventies from
Get hit by a Savonarola or somebody
Who's gonna
ban and burn books and

And we see the backlas against creativity, innovation, and diversity
happening. Uh we had happened in this country.
uh in over the past four or five years.
It's happened uh in Europe, some and in Hungary, and to so you see a backlash against
uh modernity. You also see what's happening in the United States, which I think is really good, which is a dispersal.
of creativity and cradles of creativity. It used to be very concentrated in Silicon Valley when it was all engineer driven.
But now that it's driven by people
with creativity in various realms, whether it be music or art or literature, or for that matter, figuring out truck driving routes or figuring out manufacturing logistics or boxing materials.
Uh and also where the creativity and the technology is not just digital engineering.
But tends to have to be connected to the humanities, or for that matter, to the life sciences.
So now in the United States.
You're seeing places like Austin, Texas, or Nashville or New Orleans
Boston, of course, with uh the huge boom in biotech.
But even in small places like Chattanooga.
Or Cleveland, Mississippi, places with good colleges or universities
Uh where there's creativity.
You don't have to have it all concentrated.
In Silicon Valley the way it was.
for the final quarter of the twentieth century.
Do you think we need it to sort of like come together for a revolution and then disperse and then another hundred years from now come together again and then disperse with whatever the new technology is? Or is it something that can always be dispersed?
I think that it's almost like we found during the pandemic, which is if you want some bursts of creativity, it helps to have a lot of people actually interacting in real time, face to face in an intimate fashion. And then you can disperse that creativity, whether it's a group that gets together and starts figuring out
how to do gene editing technology and then they all go
to their labs around the world and do it on Dropbox and Zoom and
uh other ways of social media.
I think that's a metaphor for how we as a society sometimes have
Big bangs that start in a singularity, a particular place.
And then
the uh energy
uh gets dispersed and
People during the pandemic moved to places like my home town of New Orleans'cause they could work anywhere and they decided they wanted to work in a place that was more fun or edgy or
had more music or would have more food, whatever they like.
And so that dispersal happened because of the pandemic.
I think they also found that in places like that where they're great research universities like Tulane or great
Medical centers.
Uh there's ways of having the creativity.
But once again, as we see with this new revolution I write about in the codebreakers, which is biotech, it does help to have a certain center.
of the explosion. At the moment that's Kendall Square in Cambridge, with
Harvard and MIT, and then the Boston area, which has more research hospitals
you know, inch for inch than the any other place in the world.
So you're right. It's sort of big bangs coming out of
intense places like Kendall Square Cambridge or the Berkeley area now in California where Jennifer Dowden is, but then dispersing. Well we're watching in Memphis.
Just recently
They're using CRISPR to cure people of sickle cell.
Well, you know, that's Memphis is a new center of creativity.
I wanna switch gears here and come back to Da Vinci for a second. I mean, I think it seems natural to sort of explore Da Vinci after jobs because
Like jobs, he was at the intersection of technology and arts.
Only in a very different era. I think you said Leonardo had the ability
not just to connect art and science, but to make no distinction between the beauty of art and science.
I remember uh all of Steve Jobs' product presentations they'd end with that street sign showing an intersection of two streets.
call the arts and technology or
uh the liberal arts
and engineering.
And I think people who stand at that intersection tend to be more creative.
Obviously in history the person who bowed
uh symbolizes it, but practices it.
is Leonardo Da Vinci, his Vitruvian man, you know, that naked guy doing jumping jacks in the circle and the square.
That is an icon and a symbol and an intentional
drawing of Leonardo's to show the intersection.
Of us humans.
uh with the humanities, with the sciences and with spirituality, how we're standing in the cosmos and on the earth.
Leonardo Da Vinci
With the person in history
Who did the most
to understand
All that was understandable.
about all things that you could have knowledge of, from art to anatomy
No, from math to music to zoology.
He tried to understand.
Everything.
And I think that that was the key not only to his
Creativity.
But what he represented, which was known as the Renaissance man.
And
That's what the Renaissance was all about.
The rediscovery of classical knowledge
but also the connection of the humanities to the sciences.
Before then
most wisdom, including scientific wisdom, was handed down by people
Who interpreted
the teachings of the church.
Suddenly with Leonardo, you're, as he put it,
uh following people like himself he called himself a disciple of experiments
Of experience.
He really cared for
to have a fact based empirical approach to knowledge.
And that connected it to the humanities, and that's what the Renaissance was about.
He was a bit of a misfit and and getting back to that sort of um observation of reality or experiential learning, that was a byproduct of him being an illegitimate child, was it not?
Well, Leonardo definitely did not fit in. He was born out of wedlock. He was gay
He was left handed, he was
distracted, he had flamboyant ways of dressing.
And as a young teenager, he arrives in Florence and
Not fitting in.
And yet Florence, and this is why it's a cradle of creativity.
Embraces him, the Medici family, gives him work.
There you have Leonardo.
Who both fits in and doesn't fit in.
And so he has a deep curiosity about the cosmos. What is our role in the cosmos?
How do we find ourselves in this strange world?
How are we supposed to fit in?
So throughout his life he's driven by a passion and by a curiosity
About
What is this world in which we find ourselves and how do we fit in?
One thing I like about Da Vinci, um, at least or I took away from your work, is it doesn't appear he has like a mind like Newton that just has so much more horsepower than we have.
And could do things that we could never do. It seems like the stuff that he did was within our reach and it was driven by
Almost just pure curiosity how did he how did he go about pursuing so many interests and so many subjects and get so much mental horsepower out of his mind?
It's a good point because I wrote about Albert Einstein and none of us can really truly aspire to be Einstein. He had more mental processing power.
He's able to do the equations that uh
describe general relativity
Uh, you know, things that most of us mortals would not be able to accomplish.
But Leonardo Da Vinci and Ben Franklin for that matter
We're not necessarily the highest powered
intellectual fire power people
Leonardo.
probably not as great of a, you know, intellectual as Luco Paccioli, his friend who is a mathematician.
But what Leonardo Da Vinci had, just like Benjamin Franklin had, just like Steve Jobs had
Was an insatiable curiosity.
And a a willingness to be curious about those things that you and I
sort of quit noticing after a while.
I looked in Leonardo's notebooks. I was reading through his notebooks, and there's a section on why is the sky blue?
I can look right out of my window here, right now.
The deep blue sky.
But I've spent all day not puzzling why is the sky blue?
And what amazed me when I saw that in Leonardo's notebooks
was boom. It's in Einstein's notebooks.
He writes, Why is the sky blue? They both do experiments. Leonardo sprays water in the air and shines light through it.
Einstein, you know, is using Lord Rayleigh's formula for the diffraction
of the spectrum of light.
All trying to figure out why the sky is blue. Now you and I are not
necessarily into all these science experiments, but every day we can push ourselves
To be a little bit more curious, to see the water rippling as Ben Franklin did on a pond and say, Why do the ripples go a different way from the wind? Or why does the duck have webbed feet, which
uh causes Franklin to invent swimming flippers and
causes Leonardo to try to understand flying.
And we see it as a kid. We're all curious as kids until grown ups say, quit asking so many dumb questions.
And then we get sort of the curiosity kicked out of us.
But Leonardo teaches us
That to be creative.
All we have to do is nurture that natural curiosity we all have inside of us.
One of the things that struck me that you wrote about a little bit was why fish are faster in water than birds are in air. Can you explain that?
Well, yeah, I mean these are the type of things that Leonardo was curious about. Leonardo says, Wait.
Water
uh is heavier. It's harder to go through. Why can fish
Go faster.
uh than birds.
And he looked at how birds flap their wings. He notices which species flap them up faster or flap them down faster.
When they take off.
He notices how the web feeds of dogwood.
He does experiments with flowing water. So does Ben Franklin when he gets to London.
Franklin
has a little machine that shows flowing water and he's looking
for how things resist the flow of water and how they can use water.
Use a flipper in water to go faster,'cause there's more to push against than there is
With the air.
Now these are simple things.
You and I can figure out
Hey, you can push against water, you can push against air, what will work, what won't
But the thing about Ben Franklin
And about Leonardo da Vinci.
Is that
They're both doing that. They're even making little experiments, desktop experiments, to figure it out.
What was Da Vin's relationship with Michelangelo?
Not good.
Uh, they're both in Florence, both gay.
Uh Leonardo was proudly and openly gay, had a boyfriend, uh Salae, who he
draws and writes about and brings with him wherever he goes.
But Michelangelo, it was sort of known as the agony and the ecstasy. He fear the wrath of the Lord. He was much more
religious and Leonardo da Vinci was
agonized about his you know sexual orientation and many other things.
And so they're not destined to be the best friends. Uh
Uh, Michelangelo's a little bit younger, uh, but they're both the superstars in the art world in Florence.
uh in the late fourteen hundred
And they have a few encounters on the street that turn a bit nasty.
But partly I just think it was a difference in personality.
Leonardo loved people. He was very gregarious. He always had
scientists and artists and apprentices and students
and musicians and uh historians and writers around him
And uh Michelangelo was very much of a loner.
And I guess that's why I was attracted a bit more to Leonardo da Vinci.
I tend to think as we talked about earlier in the podcast
that having people around you stimulate your creativity.
And so they pushed each other to go
to go beyond where they would have gone on their own. I think at one point they both quit the same commission, didn't they? They were both hired as rivals and
Right. They were great competitors and the uh elders of Florence took uh
uh made use of that by commissioning
Them to do works.
On
opposite sides of the big hall, the big room
in the town hall building.
And Leonardo was gonna do a Battle of Angiari painting.
And uh Michelangelo was doing another battle painting and there they were.
Almost as if it were
you know, a uh shark tank or some
You know, bake off.
And they each become somewhat unnerved.
Uh Leonardo's drawings are just spectacular.
With horses having
You know your faces contorted in rage and everything else.
Uh, Michelangelo has a lot of nude people bathing. I mean they're both very intense.
Drawings, but they both
Quit.
before they finish. It's almost
as if the competition drove them forward.
But after a while the competition became too intense.
Michelangelo leaves to go to Rome and ends up painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
Leonardo, we end up going to Milan.
And among other things, painting the last supper.
So they each remain rather productive.
But they forego that commission in Florence.
That's a really interesting point. One of the things that struck me about
uh Da Vinci and painting was that he only finished twelve paintings.
And to what extent was perfect sort of the enemy of good with him?
Totally. I mean he was very much a perfectionist.
Something that he shared with Steve Jobs, who would hold up shipping the original Macintosh.
Because the circuit board inside was not beautiful enough. And so that perfection
uh really hurt him. But Steve Jobs finally realized they had a sign made for him when he
Came back to Apple after his exile.
And he had talked about what real artists do. They put up a sign saying real artists ship.
Which means you get the product out the door.
Leonardo never had that sign on his studio door.
All of his great paintings took a long time.
Even when he finished them, he never really delivered them. The Mona Lisa was a commission.
of a merchant in Florence uh for a picture of his wife.
Leonardo.
keeps that painting as he goes to Milan, keeps the painting as he goes to Rome, keeps the painting until it's by his deathbed when he's in France. And he keeps thinking there's more and more brush strokes I can put on it to make it more perfect, to make the eyes follow you, to make the smile more mysterious. So even though that is pretty much a finished painting,
It still wasn't shipped to the uh original person with the commission.
And so many times whether it's the adoration of the magi or
Or Jerome in the wilderness.
Oh or for that matter the bottle of Angieri in the Florence uh town hall.
Uh we have half of what Leonard did. We have the drawings, we have the sketches, we have an unfinished painting.
but sometimes the conception was more important to him than the execution.
And when the execution became hard.
Or became something he didn't feel that he could hit out of the park.
He just left it at the conceptual stage.
That's really interesting. And it's my understanding the Mona Lisa wasn't ever famous during his day. It became famous when it was stolen from the Louvre. Is that correct?
No, um
First of all, it was a grand painting even in his time. Okay. And even by his bed in you know, in a uh chateau in France where
the king has brought him to France and uh
Become his patron.
A cardinal comes by from Italy and admires the painting and writes about it.
Uh so it was known by the end of Leonardo's life.
that it was going to be a masterpiece. It doesn't become the most famous painting in the world. In fact
It remains part of the collections of the King of France. It's
you know, hung in their chateaux and eventually in their castles
So it it doesn't reach the stature that it now
is
I think you could say it's the most famous painting ever done.
Uh, and that grows over time, including when it was once stolen.
But
Over the course of history.
That painting has mesmerized art critics more and more.
And it really is interactive. It really does speak to you.
When you first see the Monolisi, you might be disappointed. It's rather small.
But as you spend time with it, it continues.
to delight and to
surprise you.
Even as you move your head and watch the lips and the eyes and
It's a masterpiece of both science and of art.
And that was through the the painstaking addition of microscopic sort of brush strokes over years and years and years to create that effect. Is that correct?
Absolutely. The more layers sheer.
thin layers of uh
His painting, his brush strokes, his
Ah because
He understands how light diffracts.
How it hits our eye.
That if it hits the center of eye you see more detail, if it hits the corner of eye
You see shadows and colours better.
So if you look at the very detail
directly at the corner of the lips of the Mona Lisa
They actually aren't turned up.
But if you move your head a little bit and you catch the shadows and the colors better
The lips seemed to turn up.
So it becomes an interactive smile all because of the scientific brilliance of Leonardo Da Vinci as well.
As his passion.
For perfecting the Mona Lisa. That's so cool. What was the thing that surprised you the most about Da Vinci through your study of him?
I think uh that he wanted to know everything and that he starts off
wanting to understand things, including science.
in furtherance of his art, like he's
Defecting neck muscles.
in order to do Saint Jerome in the wilderness.
Or he's studying the math of perspective in order to get the adoration of the magi correct?
Uh, but then after a while he's dissecting cadavers, you know, to study the muscles and the skeleton.
But he's going down, he's studying the heart.
He's studying the heart valves, and
This is not what you need to know for your paintings.
Uh he's doing it.
Not because it's useful.
But because
He's curious.
And I think what surprised me was that Leonardo da Vinci's curiosity
Was driven
Not
Because there was some utility to it.
But because it delighted him.
Wanna come next to Ada Lovelace. You considered writing a biography on her. In fact, she's the first and last figure in your book.
uh the innovators
What makes her such a special historical figure?
She was the first person to understand the general purpose computer could do.
Uh and she writes the first algorithm. So in many ways
She has the conceptual birth of the computer.
And what struck me as something we've talked about in this podcast was people who stand at the intersection of the arts and the sciences.
Her father was Lord Byron, the great romantic poet.
But her mother wasn't particularly fond of Lord Byron when
uh Ada was growing up. If you know anything about Lord Byron, he wasn't the perfect husband
And so um
Ada's mother had Ada tutored only in mathematics, hoping it would prevent her from being poetical.
Instead Ada invents what she calls poetical science. Not invents, but she embraces
Poetical science, loving both the humanities and the science, loving math.
As well as poetry.
And so when she sees the looms in England that are s weaving these great patterns using punch cards
She realizes that the use of punch cards to
determine how a beautiful pattern could be.
woven
That those punch cards could be used on a machine that one of her friends, Charles Babbage, was doing
called the analytic engine.
Which was a numerical
calculator and you could use punch cards and what Ada wrote in his her notes to the analytical engine.
Was that with this type of device
The machine could do
Not only numbers
But anything that could be notated in symbols. It could do words. It could do music.
It could do patterns, it could do art.
And what does that remind you of? That's what a general purpose computer can do. It can manipulate the information of anything that can be notated.
In symbols.
And so this was a great intellectual leap under appreciated by history.
Except for those who are fans of Ada Lovelace and their legion. And and this wasn't appreciated until later with uh Alan Turing, right?
Or was it was she appreciated in her time or was it
her Lady Loveless's Well, she was a very complex figure in her time and
probably a good full length biography, but it's somewhat tragic. She became
Addicted to drugs, addicted to gambling.
you know, gambled away the family jewels, had a
uh painful life with opium trying to kill the pain.
But
So she was not a great figure of history.
But she did lay down the idea.
That machines could do everything except
Think on their own.
That machines could not be creative.
That it took the humans to be creative ones to come up with new ideas.
uh to think different.
Whereas the machines could process.
based on instructions we gave them.
Alan Turing, uh century after
Ada Lovelace writes her notes on the different uh the analytical engine.
writes his paper called Can Machines Think?
And he writes about what he calls Ada Lovelace's
Objection, Lady Lovelace's objection, he calls it, which is that machines can't think.
that they'll be able to process any symbols we give them, but they won't be able to be creative thought.
And Turing f sort of pushes the opposite.
approach.
Which is yes, machines will be able to think.
We will have machine learning. We'll eventually have artificial intelligence.
That's still a debate going on today.
Whether it's Elon Musk or
Bill Gates or many other people.
They debate whether machines will ever be able to think creatively
Light the human mind will.
I don't have an answer, but I do
Love in my book The Innovators is about exploring the Ada Lovelace school.
Which includes
Ada Lovelace, but Doug Engelbart and Alan Kay.
And J C R Lick Lighter and culminates with Steve Jobs.
The people who believe
that advances will come from human computer connections.
human computer interfaces like the
Graphical interfaces on our computer.
That make us closer to our machines.
And then the other school being the Allen Turing School.
That goes all the way through people, including Bill Gates.
Who
think that machines will be able to acquire an artificial intelligence
That will surpass humans and perhaps leave humans behind.
So if we zoom out a little bit, what are some of the lessons that we can observe that are common across these subjects that are innovators that we can apply at work or in our day to day life?
Have a broad vision. Be curious about everything.
I had the f great good fortune of growing up at Time Magazine.
Which was one of the last of the general interest magazine.
And it meant that one week I'd be writing the medical section.
The next week I'll be writing
The music section.
I'd be writing foreign affair one week and business the next week and
politics the f the following week and
So I got to be interested in many things.
And to me that helped me see patterns that happen across
Creation.
Uh those are the lessons of my great innovators.
Nowadays we tend to be more siloed, whether it you're at a university and you specialize in a silo, or for that matter, your journal uh your
A media thing.
And you're not a general interest magazine. There's not a market that much for general interest magazines.
So you become a podcast with a s particular focus.
So I think my lesson is
Би куриотин, дон спеціаліз ту.
Be able to go deep on a few subjects, but make sure you can also go wide.
Think that's a really good lesson. I I just wanna challenge a little bit about what you said about writing about multiple different subjects. So
How how does that affect your ability to write about them and understand them if you're just sort of like switching context week to week to week?
How do you develop a deep fluency in the subject you're writing about?
You know, Asal Khan who does Khan Academy has a great phrase which is you can learn anything.
And uh the hardest for me was learning the math of general relativity. I d
study tensor calculus. I'm still no great expert at it. But if you put your mind to it, you can learn anything.
After learning the mathematical equations of general relativity from my Einstein bio, and by the way, I didn't put them in the book. I just felt I had to know it.
In order to simplify it in the book.
I figured okay, I can easily learn
What uh R and A does as a messenger.
inside a human cell.
uh when it comes to a coronavirus vaccine. Now
wasn't quite as hard as the math of general relativity. So I do think if you put your mind to it.
You can pretty much be familiar with many different fields.
Uh secondly
I do think that there's a value
to the person who's not.
The expert.
You know, especially when it comes to science and technology.
Most scientists, and I love them.
Aren't great.
at popularizing and explaining what they do. Some are. Brian Green is, Carl Sagan was
Neil deGrasse Tyson is
But generally scientists
They're part of a
priesthood and they talk in a type of jargon
And it's hard for them to explain.
The beauty
of what they're working on. So I think there's room for people like myself who are just passionately curious
And we'll take the time, sometimes a year or so, to drill deep into a subject, but then we'll try to write about it.
for the lay person, for the person who's not an expert, for the person whose last biology course was in high school.
How important is it you're you're a writer, you're a professor, how important is it that we go to the source when we can and don't get it through the secondary, third
Fourth order sources.
Well, that's why uh when I did Leonardo da Vinci
We're so blessed. We have more than seven thousand pages of his notebooks.
I mean paper's a great technology for the storage and retrieval of information.
It has
a battery life that's almost infinite. It uh
operating system never goes out.
So I can go around the world
And look at Leonardo's notebook.
And not only sort of
read in a second hand way what information he had in it, but see the doodles in the margins, the way he drew little design, to see how his mind leaped on the page.
From
You know, sketching out possible faces for the last supper.
Two
figuring how to square the circle using
Triangles and circles and rectangles.
So I like seeing his mind leap around on the page. Same with Ben Franklin. I went up to Yale in the box after boxes of papers.
Einstein's papers.
In the end, I read most of them in bound volumes, which you can actually see behind my shoulder.
there on my books, but I went to Hebrew University.
where the original papers are and to Caltech where the papers project is.
Because
I actually wanted to see those last pages of his notebooks.
Because I think there's something inspiring too.
about seeing the original physical product.
I I like the inspiration and sort of the doodles and the added context. I also think that there's something to
seeing their own words and seeing the what they thought was important and maybe the variables they thought were important or how they intersected and played out over time.
versus the interpretations of other people.
Uh, which are simplifying by necess or necessarily simplifying, I guess.
I think something's lost in that.
I also find
that when it's possible, when it's about a contemporary figure
You can read
all of the secondary sources and then you can read the original documents
But then you have to do the third part of the triangulation. You have to talk to people.
So if I read
The books about Steve Jobs.
That'd be fine. If I read some of the memos he wrote.
But then I have to say
why did he write that email? Or what was that memo uh really design to do?
And then you get the interviews.
And so I'm not
As a historian
The best at archival diving.
Bob Carroll.
David McCullough.
They're they're wizards when they come to archive.
And as a journalist
I may not be the best interview. Bob Woodward could probably outrun me on any day of the week.
But
I think I'm pretty good.
at the intersection of being able to do a whole lot of interviews and getting people to talk to me.
But also going really deep into the archives and studying
The written record.
And so I like to combine the two, and that's part of my journalist training. Let's explore that a little bit about the the interviews. How do you how do you extract information from other people? Like what is there a tip or trick or
process or anything you've learned that's really effective at getting the best information from other people?
My first day as a journalist
In the Times Picky In of New Orleans, when I was about seventeen and had a summer job.
I went
And somebody had
A a young woman, a young girl had been
Killed.
And
I went out and I was supposed to do
find out about it. And when I called the story back in, there's the days before email, had to go to a payphone, if you remember what that was, and phone it back to the office.
My editor said, What happened when you interview the parents?
So I didn't go bother the parents, and
He said, Go knock on the door.
And interview the parent.
So I took a deep breath and I did it.
And I learned my first lesson, which is people like to talk.
And they like to talk about themselves and what happened. And they especially like to talk if you like to listen.
If you're not trying to guide the talk, you're not trying to explain things to them.
And so I just said, Tell me about
And they did.
And so ever since then I realized I can call up anybody.
And they usually want to talk, especially about themselves,'cause they usually find themselves very interesting.
And if I just listen.
They'll keep talking.
And if sometimes they don't answer my question
I just stay there and listen and I'm silent.
They gotta feel the s fell the silence.
And they talk.
Well let's come to CRISPR and gene editing. W what is CRISPR and what is gene editing?
CRISPR is just a pretty simple tool.
That we can reprogram.
To cut
our own
DNA.
If we decide that there's a sequence in our DNA we don't like.
Like a sequence that causes sickle cell.
In our blood.
CRISPR is a tool.
We can edit.
A map.
And it's a tool that Jennifer Dowden and her colleagues won the Nobel Prize for this past year.
Uh inventing.
And what they did
was they adapted something that bacteria have been using for a billion.
Bacteria have this
These clustered repeated interspersed uh sequences
Known as Crispers.
In their own genetic code.
And that comes from
Having to fight off viruses.
They take a mugshot of the virus that attacks them. And then if the virus attacks again
They use a scissors known as an enzyme.
To cut it up.
And that's pretty useful in this year when we've had to learn how to fight viruses.
It's also useful'cause you can repurpose that tool.
To cut our own DNA.
To edit our own genes.
I mean the promise of this on one hand is sort of like making our lives better, fighting cancer, fighting COVID, we're taller, we're faster, we're smarter, we're stronger. And yet on the other hand, we have things like bioweapons, designer babies. I'm are we messing with things we don't understand?
Yes. And that's why Jennifer Dowdner
After she invented this technology
I was shaken.
Because she had a nightmare.
That somebody wanted to understand the technology she invented. She goes into the room and it's Adolf Hitler.
And she realizes that in the wrong hand or with the wrong sets of social
guidance on what we're gonna use this tool for
It could be
both something of great promise but also of peril.
So my book is about her
Not only inventing
These tools with her colleagues
But also then gathering scientists as well as ethicists and politicians and ordinary people.
Just say.
What are the rules of the road?
Are we going to use this tool?
Should we allow this tool to be used?
To fight sickle cell anemia.
Well yeah.
That makes sense.
And what about used in people to
Make us more immune to viruses. Well, maybe that makes it.
What a
about uh increasing our memory.
Well
Do we want to do that?
What about allowing rich people to buy better memory for their kids?
But since this technology is not gonna be free
It'll encode the inequalities of our society into our species.
Well, we know we don't want to go there.
So my book
Not only is about understanding what the technology is, but I want people to understand it because we're all going to have to be part of this discussion. We can't seed it.
to the scientists to be in charge of this.
And so the book is about
part of the uh last half of the book
It's about going step by step saying, When should we use it and when should we not?
We all have to be part of this discussion.
One thing that's interesting about this discussion is unlike
weapons of mass destruction where it they're hard to accumulate. Uh they're you know the they're in relatively few hands.
Seems like uh biohackers have or or could
Develop this in the
Their basement.
Well you know, I edited James and Jennifer Dowden's lab. I
Motto of my old school I went to in New Orleans was
We learned to do by doing and so I did it.
And that kinda frightened me'cause I was able to edit human cells. Now, don't worry, we flush them down the drain with chlorine and
the cell I edited are not now part of our planet.
But yeah, they're biohackers. One
really funny, interesting
Delightful and slightly controversial guy in my book, Josiah Zayner.
Uh runs a store called The Odin and you can
Go online and get Crisper and
Use CRISPR maybe to regulate the myostatin, so you'll have bigger muscles, things like that.
So yes, uh, this is not like an atom bomb, which can't be built in a basement. So we're gonna have to learn what are the social rules of the road in doing this.
But how do we enforce those rules?
Well, I think they only get to be enforced.
If
We all agree to them. And that's why I wrote this book.
I'm hoping we'll talk about this now and we'll have a social consensus. People say, Well, that's hard to have, but yeah, we do that all the time.
We have
Social consensus now, maybe against
Elephant tusks trafficking or
Slavery, uh child trafficking. But we sort of have social rules against everything from
shoplifting to drug trafficking to whatever.
And that's how society tends to regulate these things.
Now with CRISPR it's not like you have to reg you have to stop it totally.
I mean one atom bomb and you can be toast.
But you know, if we can prevent
Crisper from becoming
you know a regular commonplace thing
I think we'll be able as a society
Two
Decide.
No, this is where you don't go and this is where you do go.

Jennifer had her own Michelangelo through this. There was a bit of competition, I understand, in terms of coming up with this. Can you explain that story to us?
Yeah, the book is partly about the great race between Jennifer Dowdner and her team, which includes Emmanuel Sharpin, the French
uh biologists.
Who won the Nobel Prize with her?
And they're competing against many labs around the world, but especially
A really great and charming young scientist named Fang Zhang.
who is at the um Broad Institute of MIT in Harvard.
And after Jennifer and Emmanuel
Discover
How CRISPR can be engineered

A race ensues to say who can make it work and show how it works in human cells first.
And it takes them both six months along with some other labs.
It's a race that Jennifer Dowden's team loses actually by two weeks.
And Feng Jiang's team.
Gets the
uh original the first patents on it. And they've been involved in both this race and this competition, and now a patent battle over it.
So competition helps spur science. It's a good thing.
Competition
can be for patents, it can be for Nobel Prizes, it can be for publication priority.
Uh and in this case
It's a race, just like when Jennifer was a young child, she read the double helix.
The book that Jim Watson wrote about
the discovery of the structure of DNA and the race that he and Francis Crick were in against Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins at another university and against Linus Pauling.
So competition
Can make you do bad things. Uh
Crick and Watson, Purloin, the imagery.
Done by Rosalind Franklin without her permission, but competition also causes you to work nights and weekends.
So my book is about
The good sides and the bad sides of competition and the good sides and the bad sides of collaboration.
Are there any areas where you disagree with them?
My thinking evolves.
Every time I get an email.
My thinking evolves.
I'll tell you the story not about me, but about a wonderful
Ephesist in my book.
He's actually only seventeen. His name is David Sanchez. You'll see the picture of him.
Like in a little tube of blood.
Because he's a seventeen year old who loves playing basketball.
Except for when he doubles over in pain in the middle of the court,'cause he has sickle cell.
And so they're treating him for sickle cell at Stanford. At one point, Matthew Portius, who's a great
Genetic engineer there.
says we may be able someday to edit your sperm or reproductive cells, so your children won't have sickle cells.
And David Sanchez says, That would be great.
But then a little later he says
But maybe that should be up to my kids.
After they're born.
It's for them to get to decide do they want to be edited.
And you think, what's that all about?
He says, Well sickle cell forge my character.
It made me persistent.
It gave me empathy.
It taught me how to get up off the floor.
So maybe it's useful for my kids to have that. Maybe they should decide.
And I thought that's pretty profound.
But then I asked him a few months later, I said, What do you think?
And he said, I think I would edit my
kids, I don't want them to have sickle cells and what about persistence and empathy?
He said, I'd try to teach them that, but I don't want them to feel the pain.
Now the reason I tell this story is not because there's a right answer.
But because
David.
In his wisdom had first thoughts, second thoughts.
Third thoughts.
So to answer your question.
I have first thoughts.
A second thought.
I'm now on to my third thoughts, and some day we'll be on to my fourth shot.
Yeah.
My book.
It's not about giving the answers. I'm gonna hurt the sales of the book by telling you.
There's no last chapter.
With the answers.
But their first, second, third, and fourth
thoughts in the book about different types of where we should go.
Maybe we should use it here. What about depression? What about psychology? What about schizophrenia?
What about tickle cell? What about?
Better athletic abilities.
And I want the reader to be like me to go hand in hand with me and Jennifer Down and David Sanchez.
Having first thought, second thoughts, third thought.
'Cause it's a slippery slope.
But slippery slopes.
Are a little bit safer.
If you do it hand in hand, step by step.
And that's what this book is about.
It's really interesting. And final question. Uh thank you so much for your time.
How do you want your work to be remembered?
You know, there are people in the arena.
I started early on with a book with a friend called The Wise Men about the people who created American foreign policy.
Uh right after World War Two. And you know
Yeah, people like Einstein and Da Vinci and Steve Jobs and now
Uh Jennifer Downer.
Those are the people who do things. Uh they see the world differently. They push the human race forward.
I know that
I'm not one of
those people.
But have a small role to play.
Which is I tell their stories.
And I think being able to inspire people with their stories.
It may not make me.
Uh certainly doesn't make me a Leonardo da Vinci or Steve Jobs or
Uh Ben Franklin.
But there's a role for some of us.
As I said, growing up in Louisiana
Being told, don't be a preacher, be a storyteller.
And then if we can tell the stories, we can inspire the next generation.
When she was in middle school
Jennifer Downer came home one day.
And found on her bed.
The book, The Double Helix by James Watson. And she read it and she saw Rosalind Franklin, this biochemist in it.
And she said, Oh, I didn't know women could become scientists. And she was inspired by Rosalind Franklin, but also by Watson and Crick and others to say, I want to become a scientist. And so she had been thinking, I'm gonna study French.
But no, she decides she's gonna become a chemist. She got inspired.
I
Hope that some day
My books are left on the bed.
of people's daughters and sons and nieces and nephews.
And maybe they're inspired to be a Steve Jobs, to be a Jennifer Dowden, to be a Ben Franklin.
Even to be a Leonardo da Vinci.
And
We can help people understand.
How innovation happened.
How creativity happens.
How building great teams happen.
If we can be inspired by the people who are successful in doing it.

That's beautiful.
Thanks for having me.
Thank you.
The Knowledge Project is produced by the team at Farnum Street.
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