Transcripts For CSPAN2 In Depth 20150202

Its meaning, and ive always liked to write about real people who are in a situation whether it be averill hairman after world war ii and you have a create a new world ordinary like nato and the world bank and the Marshall Plan 0 steve jobs who says were now in a digital revolution, we have to make it personal. These are people who to use steve jobs words, were able to think different, think out of the box. I want to try to explore the creative mind and how it works. Host one of them themes themes in your book seems to be a connect to spirituality. Guest everybody believed they were part of something larger than themselves. I remember sitting with steve jobs and i asked him why did you do what you do . And he said, life is like a river. You get to pick things out of the river, really cool things people have done, they put before you in the river, great devices or great ideas, but after a while you realize its not how much you get to take out of the river its what you put back into the river, what you leave behind so that your spirit is still manifest after you have been gone and whether its Albert Einstein or Benjamin Franklin or anybody else, they did have a connection to something super natural, something somewhat larger than themselves. Host from 2011 your book on steve jobs, opening sentence. In the early summer of 204 i got a phone call from steve jobs. Guest uhhuh. Host why did he call you . Guest i had written a biography of Benjamin Franklin, and he asked me to do him next. I thought, ben franklin Albert Einstein, then you . Then i realize he had been sick and fighting cancer, and we dont always look at Creative Minds in business and entrepreneurship, and to me to be able to get very close to and try to peel back the layers from the greatest business and Technology Innovator of our day and generation, was going to be something truly special. Id known him since around 1984 when he came to Time Magazine toy toy to show off the original macintosh, and we had remained moderately good friends, especially when i was editing time and he used me to market. I liked stop jones and his passion. When i got his call i thought is was special. Host i asked jobs why he wanted me to be the one to write his biography. I think youre good at getting people to talk he says. Guest he was he was somebody 0 who understood the power of listening and i learn that from him a little bit too. Because when i started working with him, id ask a whole lot of questions, and sometimes id have all sorts of premising then i realize it if i just let him go just say ipod and he would go on for on hour or two i do really listen and try to pick up the rhythms of the way his mind worked. So im not necessarily the best academic historian, and may not even been the best reporter when it comes to writing books but im pretty good at just getting people to be willing to talk to me and i hope thats because i try to listen. And im lucky. Having been at Time Magazine or cnn, if call up and ask to speak to larry page im more likely to be able to get through. So i should go visit gordon moore, moores law, and hi laws and spend time with wozniak because i have been blessed too having access to these people. So thats what i try bring to the party. There will be people who take the steve jobs book of the innovators book, and do a better analysis what does this mean hough does this lead to leadership lessons. For me, what i do is i can call people up, sit down listen, try to get the quotes right and put it there as if its a first draft for other people who might be able to analyze things from the book. Host is this book an authorized biography, steve jobs. Guest not in the technical sense of the term. When steve and i talked he kept saying, i dont want to read the book first. Because he said to me, one of the things that made steve jobs what he was, he was brutally honest. He said ive always tried to be brutally honest and i want you to be brutally honest, and it will be hard. He said, im not going to ask to read the book before it comes out. Im not going to have any say over whether you use an anecdote or not. He said ill read it six months after it comes out. Thats why summer of 2011, after he stepped down from apple we as ceo of apple, we discussed, when should the book come out . He said lets make it i think you should make the last scene when i step down as ceo of apple. And so i did and the book went to the printers and i was hoping, hoping he would be alive when the book came out. In fact he told me, the last time we talked every turned the book in in he said i prom mitted you i wouldnt read it when it came out but ill read it in six months. And this was in late august, and that made me feel good. I thought okay hell beat the cancer one more time and live another half year or maybe two years, but then, of course we were not so lucky. Host he has no idea. Guest i did sit with him and read parts of the book to him especially the last chapter, the last chapter is where i take a lot of things he told me and i bring it together and let him have the last word for four or five pages in the book, where from different interviews i took his thoughts, his broad thoughts about why he did what he did what was the meaning of life for him. So i put those together and put them together from two or three separate formal interviews i had had, and i wanted to read it outloud to him just to make sure he was comfortable with it. I also theres some things in the book where he is personal or tough on people or anecdotes im not sure you or i would want in books, and i made sure he know about each one of those. Especially ones where i thought he might want to like where he doesnt give somebody Stock Options or is mean to somebody or whatever. I wanted to let him explain his side of it. So anything in the book that i felt might be a little tough, that he wouldnt like i made sure he knew about it before hand because that was the way steve jobs was. He didnt try to sugar coat things. Im not as brave as courageous as steve was but i learned from him. So the last few interviews with him, id go over things in the book i thought he would not like. Host and if grew to the index and under steve jobs, you find mood swings of. Offensive behavior of, and theres five lines of pages where offensive behavior of is in there, and a couple other things prankster, primal scream therapy. Guest well, that was something that i was as i said felt very fortunate that he let me get very up close to talk about things like his primal scream therapy, or talk about examples where he was really tough on people and he encouraged me to be honest about it and we would talk about those things. So in some ways i felt by the end of the process i knew more about him than i knew about myself. He was a very selfreflective individual. He understood himself extraordinarily well, and he was very willing to talk about it, and fortunately for me repeatedly he encouraged me just put it all in. Every now and then id say there were a few thinks i left out, just thought, unnecessarily painful to some other people, and didnt really give you much of an insight on steve and side go over with my wife and say that story should be left out. That will actually hurt this person and wont help the reader that much. But every time id ask him, heed say, put it in whether its about his previous girlfriend, whether it was about the daughter he had before he got married. All of these things, i said he said, told you put those things in. Host was he smart you write . No not exceptionally. Instead he was guest i compare him and contrast him to an absolutely wonderful smart guy of course bill gates, and bill gates had more of what you call conventional mental Processing Power. I marvel and watch bill gates take large amounts of information, sometimes two screens on his desk screens would have four windows on them and hed be processing the information, and just be absolutely brilliant. Steve was not brilliant in that way. He did not have that analytical Processing Power. He had an intuitive genius. He could have a feel for things. A feel for what people would like. A feel for beauty. A feel for what would work. And so to me, thats what i meant by genius. Like in Albert Einstein, which is Albert Einstein was not the best physicist in europe in 1905. In fact he was a third class patent examiner in the Swiss Patent Office because he couldnt get his ph. D. They kept rejecting his thesis. Cooperate get a job at a university. So you wouldnt say oh, he is by conventional standards the greatest physicist mind of 1905. But he was the greatest genius. He was able to make imaginative and intuitive leaps. I would never put nor has steve jobs every put steve in the same quan tim orbit as Albert Einstein, but there was a similarity, which is that the genius of steve jobs came from making intuitive leaps. Imaginative leaps. Questioning received wisdom and thats what ben franklin did that what steve jobs did, that what Albert Einstein did question the received wisdom of a newton, righting at the beginning, that time marches along, second by second irrespective of how we observe it. You get this patent clerk, Albert Einstein. How do we test that, take two clocks and synchronize them . Likewise with steve jobs, he peep didnt know we needed a thousand songs in our pocket. We had walkmen, mp3 players a big part of our life but steve was able to have a feel for beauty and a feel for Customer Experience that to me made him the greatest intuitive genius of the digital age and thats what i meant by that sentence. Host Walter Isaacson, there is one aspect of steve jobs had a role in with this book and that was the cover. We have a couple of different covers and the original well show on the air and then show you the paperback cover as well. What was his concern about the cover . Guest well, when i first did a cover, was with Simon Schuster and it was an apple and steve in it. Just the test cover they were doing. And once he got mad, he got very mad. I was on the way to seem him, landed at the San Francisco airport, took out my iphone there was a thing you least want to see, which is seven missed phone calls from steve jobs. I said uhoh, something i actually was worried. I thought maybe something happened. So i hit return phone call. Answered instantly and he starts this reaming me out yelling at me saying, you have no taste. I thought i had no idea what he was talking about. I kept saying kept trying to interject, tell me what youre upset about he said that cover. And i didnt even know what he was talking about. Apparently the cover that Simon Schuster put it in online catalogues. He said that was ugly. Im not going to cooperate with you anymore because youre going to put an ugly cover on the book. I said i hadnt thought about the cover yet. The book is not finish. He said unless you agree to let me have some input in the cover im not going to cooperate anymore. That was the easiest decision to make. Within a half second i said, great, help me help suggest a better cover. He said, black and white, make it simple. We went through a lot of photographs. I loved the Albert Watson photograph that ended up on the cover host the old steve jobs. Guest the older steve jobs the one with his probably have it on the screen now and that is Albert Watson, one of the great favreers. At Time Magazine i worked with Albert Watson, he did that for Fortune Magazine but there were four or five pictures he what considering. I hoped we could agree on the Albert Watson picture, and we did. Then he just wasnt that hell vet tick helvetica type. No curly cues or doodads on it. He said i like heltica. Steve loves font. Thats why in the macintosh its a bitmap display with fontses. Thats why we have beautiful computers. To steve it made a difference. Benjamin franklin liked it. He brought franklin bold and stuff, those type of fontses, they do a lot of them were based on helvetica. The only thing that i pushed back on is he wanted my name in dark type and his name in light gray thinking that it was my book and my name should i said no, no this isnt has nothing to do with me. This book is all about you. You cooperated. Every word in there is something built on something you said and so i wanted steve jobs to be the darker type and me to be more recesssive and thats how i turned out. But there was maybe eight or nine conversations, and with his own artistic directors and great people at apple, design directors, making sure that the cover that looks so, so simple Pretty Simple looking cover, took a lot of work. Sometimes simplicity is the ultimate sophistication and sometimes simplicity is difficult, because as steve jobs said and is a his great design directors often said, simplicity isnt about just making things easy or taking things out. You have to understand the depth of something. You have to truly dig deep and go hard. Its hard work to create simplicity. So leave out something. And that is what steve jobs was able to do on the ipod on the iphone, the ipad the original macintosh, and he pushed to make sure it was done on the cover. That was his genius. Why the younger steve jobs on the paperback. Guest by the time the the hardback had been out for a year. The Albert Watson photograph was iconic Apple Computer used it on their posters. It was used in the memorial services. It had just become the standard iconic photograph. I think there were people, both at apple and Simon Schuster who said dont keep building on that one. Try something i also saw the picture i think it was done for Rolling Stone in the early 1980s, in which steve is in the exact same pose. You have it there. On the paperback and i thought, well this will just be something fresh and new. Steve always used the phrase, think different, and i think whether it was Albert Watson or apple or Simon Schuster everybody felt it wouldnt be thinking different if we used that, and i think apple felt rightly, took that the iconic and classic image was something they owned and i wanted to make sure that with the paperback i think they asked, too that we tried to think different. Host what was the importance of lorraine powell. Guest somebody who was important to steve. He somebody who deeply steve jobs, and i think he would say to me that his life wouldnt have been the same having not met her, and had she not helped make him who he was. So by the way the whole family. Unlike a lot of powerful people he wasnt out on the circuit every day. He wasnt having dinner every night with famous people. He was having dinner at the long table in the kitchen of his house, with his three kids that he and maureen had, wonderful kids and he would talk, deep serious conversation. No playing on the iphone or ipad during dinner. So as a family man, steve was sometimes rough around the edges, whether it was at home or the office or work or whatever but the one thing you discover is that even though he was rough around the edges, at work he developed a team of people who were deeply loyal to him, and more than just loyal, they loved him. And likewise at home. He has around him a family who deeply is not only loyal to him but deeply loves him. And so when people say steve jobs was a rough character at times, he had an abrasive personality at times. He could be mean to people sometimes. I think yes. But i hope you look at what happened is that he is able to have deep love and deep loyalty at home and at the office therefore put it into a context. Some people who are mean and nasty and everybody hates them. So steve had something else. It wasnt just like he was sometimes hard to deal with. He really connected to people. He inspired them. He made them love him. And that is the essence of steve jobs. Every now and then ill read articles about bosses who try to be like steve jobs and try to be tough, or people who try to be like steve jobs and be brutally honest. I think yes but dont try it because steve could pull it off because deep inside he knew how to connect with people. He knew how to make them feel inspired. He really cared deeply about other people. Otherwise he wouldnt have known how to make such products that connected emotionally to us and so when you talk about his home life, just as you talk about his office life, there were people around him his wife his kids who truly felt a deep, deep passionate appreciation and love for him and so it was more complex than some people make it out. I wish i had conveyed that better in the book. Some people read the book and say he was kind of mean. I say wait wait, wait. I tried over and over again to say in the book yes he was tough on people, but whether it was the original macintosh team or his family, people would give up anything in the world just to make sure i would have the opportunity to work with him to be with him. To be around him. Host in the introduction to your book the inmotivators you write, as an electronic geek who loved kits and ham raid wyoming you give your ham radio address guest john thomas peter. July yet tang go papa. Im old enough to have gotten my first geek experiences soldering circuits for a ham radio and getting to play with a ham radio. Host i can remember when vacuum tubes gave way to transition temperatures. You say historians are wary about calling periods of great change revolutions would because the look at progress as revolutionary. Guest were in a revolution like the Industrial Revolution, where in the Industrial Revolution you have the steam engine that connects with mechanical processes like looms and weaving machines or whatever. And suddenly we move into an Industrial Age where machines and people are having to worth Work Together to do products. We have that here with the microchip, the computer the internet, all working together. So the three inventions each of which would have been important, but the combination of package switch Digital Network with microprocessors and microchips, with sort of the computer revolution we have, leads to a whole new way of doing not only information but of conducting business conducting your social life. Its definitely a revolution, and i think theres the person who i quote somebody, steve chapin a great historian at harvard, who wrote a book boot the scientific revolution, he begins by saying theres no such thing as scientific revolution and this is a book about it, and then he says its because of the thoughts of the people at the time that they knew they were going through a revolution, so thats why i introduce the book as a kid you look at a vacuum tube and figure out how it works on a circuit and get to test it. And you say okay its an amplifier and an on off switch. How does a suspect how does a circuit do logic with a step by step on off switch. And you get a feel i worry today that people my daughters generation they dont quite have a feel about how the on off switches and logical circuits and logic gates and algebra come together to say we can have a mon that can a machine that can do these tasks. Host in fact you say that math is spiritual. You quote somebody saying math is spiritual. Guest that comes from ada lovelace. She is the beginning of the inmotivators. She is lord byrons daughter the great romantic poet so she has a poetic streak in her but her mother was a mat ma particulars and as you imagine, knowing something about lord byron, his wife was not particularly fond of lord byron by the time ada was growing up. He was too much of a romantic and poet and had ada mainly tutored in mathematics, at if that was some antidote, and what ada does is create poetical science, the combination of poultry with science of art with technology. This is the essence of everybody i have written about. Ben franklin does it. Albert einstein does it. Its been sort of what has driven progress Leonardo Da Vinci combines the two disciplines in his work. So to me, that notion that theres a connection between math and Natural Beauty is something important for us to have a feel for, just like ada did. A lot of people were not saying i dont love math. They get upset we dont do enough Arts Education or humanities education, in schools, and agree. We need the arts and humanities. That makes us who we are. But i also feel people love the arts and humanity should try to have a feel for the beauty of math as well, just as you love shakespeare, people would be appalled if somebody didnt know the difference between hamlet and macbeth and then brag they didnt know the difference between a transition store or resist juror or a gene and chromosome and what she knew was that math mate ticks was just mathematics was the good lords brush stroke of something beautiful in the universe and that math was like her fathers poetry. People say math is hard. I say take a line of lord byrons poetry. She walks in beauty like the night. Thats pretty tough line. But if youre ada lovelace, lord byrons daughter you can visualize, walks in beauty like the night. Just like ada could visualize the beauty of an equation or algorithm. She writes algorithms to show what a computer can do the new 1830s. So she realizes theres beauty in a mathematical phrase and she can visualize that just like she can visualize she walks in beauty like the night. Thats what i meant by saying theres a beauty in both the arts the humanities on the one side and technology and science on the other side. Host you have a timeline in your book which kicks off with ada lovelace inventor of email in here the guest google host et cetera, et cetera. What is it she contributed . Guest the main thing she does when she sees the beauty of the connection of arts to science, is that she comes up with a concept of a general purpose computer. For example, show travels through end land as england as a young woman and sees the mechanical looms and they use punch cards so the looms would weave beautiful patterns and her father was a luddite, meaning his only speech was they thought they put people out of work, but ada look at those looms and said, with those punch cards it makes beautiful patterns receive she had a friend named charles back about trying to design a numbers crunching machine, and she realized that with punch cards, the analytical engine, which was the machine, as ada wrote and published and it was unusual for a woman in the 1830s to publish in scientific journals she about with the purpose cards these machines can do anything, not just numbers. Do anything that can be noted in symbols. Words, music art, design. In other words, a general purpose computer. Host you quote her as saying, the bounds of arithmetic were outstepped the moment the idea of applying cards at occurred. The analytical engine does not occupy Common Ground with mere calculating machines. It holds a position wholly its own in enabling a mechanism to combine together general symbols and discussions of unlimited variety and extent and a uniting link is established between the operations of matter and the abstract thought process. Guest that is just a beautiful way of saying some day well have computers. Host how many people did you to talk to, how many inventors and innovators . I themll. In 1992 or 93 00 i became the head of Digital Media for Time Magazine, and time warner, and so you would run into people like jim clark and Mark Andreson and andy groves, the man of the year at time. And people like thatful throughout the 90s i was always wanting to do a history of this digital revolution, because each day in generation has a great revolution or something, whether its the American Revolution we know about gorbachev and ben franklin or the french revolution or the Industrial Revolution or the scientific revolution, here i had this feeling were living through this revolution and i had a chance to meet these people. So i did a cover store on bill gates talking about the revolution steve jobs. Then when i would focu o e and then when i was focused on this book for the past six or seven years off and on while i was finishing the book i would go see gordon or mark andreas and talk to him or that truly wonderful guy and another wonderful person writes the internet protocols and afterwards how do you take these packets that they make the internet out of it and so i got a chance to be up close with these people and to me but i said id have to bring to the party is doing reporting and be able to find these people and have them talk to me because there are a lot of people who would do better in. Then i do not agree with tommy why the protocols were returned the way they were so i think i did a lot of interviews for the buck. Host would it be like talking to henry ford and the Dodge Brothers etc. . Guest sure. Obviously, the early people early on in the internet were no longer with us. If there is one person i wish i could have talked to robert is a co inventor. In other words originally created as part of a team that transistor and all that does is takes semiconducting material and conduct electricity. If you dont then it is semiconducting and you can make it in on and off switch with a transistor. How did you get a lot of transistors under one. Thats all a microchip is. When you can put a whole lot. So thats what bob does but something even more. He grades a company thats now called intel. But its a new type of company that has no great hierarchy. Its not driven from an organization chart. They all sit in an open space with somebody and he says here is new at the center and connecting everybody else. So that whole new way of doing business in the digital age and he was a mentor of steve jobs but he was very nice. He was so nice he could never say no to people which is why he had to form a partnership at the beginning because he at least knew how to get the microchips out the door by telling people no you have to focus you cant do that. Or it would be heard on the rest of the team. And so you get the genius predating the microchip and the brilliant Corporate Structure and also how do you form a right team. Bob had more and its like putting together a baseball team. Whos going to be the pitcher and whos going to be in the field. I got to interview gordon moore. His partner we all know moores law that says the law that says the exponential rise and Processing Power of the microprocessor. But so i would talk to him a lot about what was it like to work with bob and i certainly got to know and. So i got to figure out about these people. Certainly even now hes one of the heroes of the book and i wanted to make him a big famous. Just as my book was coming out in the invitation game he is the one that is going to make him famous. How is that movie . Guest it is very true to life in a there are some things in the movie that do not have been. Most notably he is a russian soviet spy. Whats true about the movie and thats so important is some key facts one of which he was an outsider. He was gay and a longdistance runner but he discovers developing the concept of the universal computing machine he has a logical computing machine all based on the computer notion that if he is going to break the german code hes going to need to Work Together as a team so partway through his time one of the women programmers in the movie says to him as do the others we are with you. Youve got to work collaboratively and he does. Many other lessons of the movie it is based on a paper that was written after about Artificial Intelligence. Maybe you would never be able to tell them apart. The game at a certain point a computer could imitate the human and you wouldnt know the difference and therefore yes they are thinking. While actually its not been that successful at reaching the Artificial Intelligence but we have been successful putting machines working in symbiosis. When he writes the paper of the game he calls it may be lovelys objection that machines will never be created for think on their own. Even very tragically as you know they tried because of his homosexual acts to give him chemical hormone treatments as if he is a machine and you can reprogram him chemically. He takes it in stride and he takes an apple, dips it into cyanide and bites into it but it also makes you realize okay the game is now over. He was a human. The machine wouldnt have done that and so there is so much depth that you can get from the movie and andrew has written a great book called the nx for the viewers to see a great biography. I have a chapter on all of this in my book and my book ends with the concept of the symbiosis between the humans and machines and how that related to the quest for artificial interventions and i find that all very interesting but to get back to your question on the great truth like any movie you can say that didnt really happen. Host good afternoon and welcome to book tv on cspan2. 48 hours of nonfiction books and authors every weekend and this is our indepth show where we invite one author to talk about his or her body of work and this was in his biographer author and journalist Walter Isaacson. Mr. Isaacson is the author of these books. First came out in 1986 the wise men and the world they need. 1992 kissinger a biography came out. Einstein his life and universe in 2007, steve jobs 2011 and finally the innovators came out last year. Mr. Isaacson is also the ceo of the Aspen Institute the former head of cnn and former chairman of the board of governors. Mr. Isaacson will be with us for the next three hours. The numbers on the screen if you would like to participate in the conversation here are the numbers 202 7488200 hundred 11 east and central time zones. 7488201 for those of you in the mountain and pacific time zone. If you cant get through and you want to participate by social media booktv is a reporter handled and you can join the conversation on facebook. Com booktv and you will see at the top of the page videos of mr. Isaacson that we shared earlier and you can also make a comment underneath that video in the comments Comment Section and finally you can send an email to booktv cspan. Org and we will begin taking your calls and social media comments in just a minute. Want to get through a couple more of your books before we get to calls. This is the ben franklin and American Life book and you write that the most interesting thing that franklin invented and continually reinvented was himself. Guest i love ben franklin and theres a great story that he tells where he is a young tradesman that arrived in philadelphia and hes trying to be a good person so he formed a club of people for the working class and they make a list of all of the values and he marks how well he has done and he finally masters all 12 of them and one of the people says hey frank when you forgot what you should try and its in the humility. He says im not very good at the virtue of humility. I never mastered it but i does get was good at the pretense of humanity. Then he says i learned the pretense was just as useful because it made you listen to the people around you to find a Common Ground and that was the essence of the democracy and so to me it was a sort of selfimprovement which was the goal but then writing about it and giving an autobiography which he rates the autobiography so we go all the way he was coming back to me is why he was reinventing and publishing his invention of himself. Host how wellknown was he and how can you compare him to a . Guest he was probably one of the best known of people in the western world but by the time he becomes the envoy to france after hes done everything from the electricity experiments from lightning rods and part of the Continental Congress and hope the declaration of independence he goes to france because of the writing they carry him to the steps to meet franklin invented himself and reinventing himself. He wears a coon skin cap and a backwards coat because the people in france have been probably reading him too often like a philosopher. He never lived in the wilderness even though the french like all of them. He could be the natural philosopher coming from this wilderness of the country in the land called america to meet with the french. Even in America John Adams was partly a friend and rival. The respect is the rivalry they had and that ben franklin and others stake in the stating the grounding of lightning happened and ben franklin would give too much credit for it but im partial and i think that he has a lot of credit for inventing what we have as a country. Host and it comes to the Founding Fathers to whom was he close . Guest jeffers and is younger and a protege. They shared something that we have been talking about on this show is the belief that an educated person should love science the arts, music should understand electricity and plans and Everything Else and that was the nytimes and in the period and in which after sir isaac newton and others the law of science and statecraft and how you live your life sort of came together and i think the two great icons. There is a committee to help maybe the Congress Gave the Good Committee it has been franklin and adams and Thomas Jefferson on it. Jefferson writes we hold these truths to be sacred. He puts that its selfevident and the notion of science that bears certain logical ways that the rights come from rationality and reason not to dictate to a particular religion. But it goes on with certain inalienable rights so they have the rationality and reason in creating the nation and bring this to me is sort of you can just see the mind of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson working. Host Ben Franklins epitaph he wrote himself, printer like the cover of an old book its contents are worn out and stripped of its buttering. The workshop of the lost or appear once more in the new and elegant addition revised and corrected by the author. First he always considered himself a printer. I loved that even when he was the most famous person in the world, the leader of both the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention he still assigned himself when he goes to the lodge or something. Second he sort of had an outlook about life and the afterlife. The president of yale is a very religious man and his belief in jesus christ and god and the afterlife. Hed written that epitaph but he didnt agonize. They just had h. Therell feel about the ute of the creations of the rights back and says no ive never quite figured that out but im going to figure it out soon enough. Host Albert Einstein. That year, 19 of five. Guest he received wisdom that matter how we absorb it and hes synchronizing clocks. They care that are earns the same instance so if you synchronize the clocks you have to have a signal to travel at the speed of light and you have a patent examiner that says what if i got caught up with one of those signals, wouldnt the stationary committee, what if im traveling through one really fast wouldnt one be different from me and so he comes up with a mental leap that turned relative. Its always constant relative. So that his special relativity but it does the same spring another paper that talks about how basically the fundamentals of the quantum theory that light is both a wave that there are particles and theres a wave and into the whole concept that becomes the quantum theory so you have two great scientific theories in the pillars that bring this to the century that takes us from the mechanics to a new world thats relativity and quantum theory and both happened in the spring of 1905 while hes sitting on the school doing thought experiments stool doing thought experiments as a patent examiner. Thats why its called the miracle for einstein. Every single great advance of the 20th century as a fingerprint of Albert Einstein. Space travel splitting of the atom gps, television. Even the microprocessor. When they are making the transistor and the innovator it is a semiconductor in a different way. It is perfectly dedicated to understanding this Quantum Mechanics that arises from the 1905 paper in the nobel prize and people are working with him. What they do is they can envision the dance of electrons in the surface state of the semi conducting material based on the Quantum Mechanics that comes out of einsteins paper is whether it is a transition or space travel or the gps and the splitting of the atom is not only a scientific advance but a huge political issue which is how we use the atom bomb. Its hard to think of something that makes our lives but it is today that doesnt have a couple fingerprint of Albert Einstein. Host he spent his time at princeton but his papers are asked how stayed . Guest caltech with physical papers are at the university, most of them. There are a set even when hes dieting and his deathbed he has nine pages of the creations to unify their relativity. With the quantum theory because they dont quite reconcile. Host we are going to show the formula. Guest it sort of dribbles off at the end. I love seeing the physical documents documents i went to caltech to go through the papers wonderful people, but even though there was a copy there, i felt i ought to pay a visit to the shrine and actually see the papers at the university so i went there and thats where the papers are and by the way something really cool all of the viewers should do right now starting about two months ago caltech princeton in the Hebrew University agreed to take the papers to put them online. Several people visit Hebrew University or caltech but we can crowd source not only are there all of the papers online but the english translations so you can read the hundreds and hundreds of letters in 1905 if youre trying to figure out what role did his wife played in the mathematics of the special relativity . Go read the papers, see the letters that he wrote helping in the office. I salute the outside papers project for doing that. Host for some people you write a miracle served as the evidence of the existence and for einstein it was the absence of the miracles that reflected the province. Guest he belief that there was a spirit manifest. So i have a whole chapter because he wrote about it a lot but he belief in a spirit manifest in the face of which we must be humbled and if that is my sense of the divine being according to the rules so the amazing thing is the universe didnt necessarily have to have the elegant and beautiful rules like to be equal mc squared that understanding those rules helps you have a sense that he didnt believe in a personal god to break the law of the universe so that the new England Patriots would win the super bowl if you played hard enough or whatever you were praying for and he said miracles show show god exist but for me it is the elegance of the law of the universe and the fact that they always hold back to me the miracle and its spiritual. So thats kind of interesting to move to that level of thinking its in the spirit of the law of deep beauty complexity because the eight vision for genital relativity is complex but its still there and it always holds. That is of the divine existence rather than praying for a miracle and having a miracle happened. Host while we have three minutes before we go to the calls. The Henry Kissinger book 1992 for a while after this book came out he didnt speak. Guest it doesnt do justice bus he is a funny guy. Host what you consider him a friend . Guest somebody that i respect and that i find has a great deep sense of how the world works and i think that anybody that has a biography about them what they would say it could have been more favorable in about kissinger i dont think that he had a deal at the time when he was National Security adviser then secretary of state for further value and the idealism that has to be in underpinning for Foreign Policy in the democratic system so hes a great realist but my fundamental criticism is yes we have to have a moral policy that have to be woven together. But weve invited everybody back on the cover and i wondered if doctor kissinger will come back because he was pretty annoyed with parts of the book and i got a phone call and they said even the 30 year war had to end at some point so i will come to your dinner. You dont always have to agree with especially the certain things that the mixing Foreign Policy did when it came to cambodia dealing with the bombing of North Vietnam and one can second the the gas guessing in the creation of world order and he was able to do a brilliant outofthebox thinking with russia and china to create a triangular diplomacy with an opening as we pulled out of vietnam in the preserves of the United States in power in the world after the retreat from vietnam by doing this triangular balance with russia china and to me that was a Creative Leap that even the best people greatest and the best hadnt thought of earlier and that helped to reserve our influence in the world. Host the wise men and the world they made. Charles kennedy and acheson, robert john. Were they the essence of the establishment . I was covering Ronald Reagan these people handing out leaflets and evan, a friend of mine from college, he had come from a more prep school background. I said evan, whats this establishment thing . Then we decide to demystify is buy writing a book at six people who at the core of the establishment there were three republicans, tree democrats, had a passion for rising above politics. They are creative. They think out of the box. After world war ii in which russia had been our ally suddenly we have to contain russia. So they create new institutions. Nato Marshall Plan world bank Radio Free Europe even the Aspen Institute, we have to win the war of ideas, of economy and a defensive struggle against sovietbacked threat of communism. That was thinking out of the box. Today, were engaged in a whole new type of struggle against terrorism, Islamic Radical terrorists. And were still using the old institutions to that still trying to make nato and the imf deal with it. Wish we were as creative as they were think another off the box and say what international antiterrorist organization should replace nato. What should we do instead of Radio Free Europe to fight the hearts and minds of people around the world. So, i like the creativity of the wise men. Clearly it was weird too have two very young people myself just out of college, go to a publisher and say we want to write about six people you barely heard of in a time that was far distant. Seem Simon Schuster, my editor said chev said yes ive always wanted to do that book and call it the wise men. Like the best and brightest, the generation before, and she was able to make that book good. She was able to untangle a pretty complicated narrative and make it flow chronologically, which is why every book ever since then has been publish bid Simon Schuster and edited by alice because i feel such a sense of loyalty that they would and she would publish a book about these statesmen nobody ever heard of and make it into a book that actually made sense after we turned in a manuscript that needed some untangling. Host alice mayhew pops up on booktv quite often as the editor or best selling authors of nonfiction books. What is it about her from an authors perspective . She sees the big picture and detail which is the essence of creativity. Whether youre a bob noyce or steve jobs you care about each the beauty of each curve in the computer youre making, but also moving to a mobile system. That was steve jobs genius, people like kissinger had that as well ben franklin seal the big picture and also know that the devil and god is in the details. I remember the very first chapter of the wise men and it was trying to keep harriman and love vet together with acheson, who went do School Together and part of skull and bones at yale and she wrote in the margin all things in good time. Dont get ahead of theonology dont get behind it. Keep itonnologial. Dont flash forward, dont have to flash back. That was the first piece of advice i ever got on a book, and every book ive done since then may not have been as brilliant as A James Joyce or faulkner who can move around in time but i realize that in our lives, we build on me moments that happened before, and that you should keep all things in good time, you should do things chronologically, you should start the biography with the person being born and end with the person dying and show how it builds up. All things in good time. Host a handful of men you write in you quote there, handful of men and few of their close colleagues knew that america would have to assume the burden of a global role out of duty and desire. They heeded the call of service. They were the original brightest and best men whose outside personalities some forceful actions brought together brought order to the post war chaos and left a legacy that dominates american policy to this day. Well, we have spent an hour talking with Walter Isaacson. Well begin taking calls emails, tweetses and Facebook Comments and weflash the addresses and phone numbers on the screen one more time. This is an email from jim gibb in east peoria illinois. Mr. Isaacson, big fan, im currently reading your biography on kissinger. Of your biographies on kissinger, franklin, einstein, and jobs who do you identify with the most and why . Guest well, ben franklin. And ill leave the woffords to the words to my daughter who, when she was young and i had down these books. She said, you know, all biography is auto biography. I think emerson said. She said when youre writes about ben franklin you were writing about yourself. She said, thats who you wanted to be a publisher, editor, person in the media and also cared about diplomacy and liked science and juggled a few things. So, ben franklin was your idealized self. I said yes that makes sense. Then i said what was i doing when i wrote about einstein . And she said, you were writing about my father an engineer at times, wonderful guy who loves electrical engineering, has halo of hair and said you were doing because your father really loved einstein, and you were trying to i said, thats great. And what was i doing when i was doing kissinger . She said you were writing about your dark side, too, and i said oh, watch out. So when i did steve jobs, she said i cant quite figure out what youre doing when you did steve jobs. I said i was writing bat young person who could be a little bit bratty a little bit pushing love beauty and technology but was a kind of hard to deal with, and then i stared at her and she said i said no, no. But i love ben franklin. I think that ben franklin is the one i get to talk to some members of Congress Later this week, at the library of congress they have a gathering that david reubenstein helped to put together, and who do you want to talk about . Talk about Ben Franklin Ben franklin is the person who was able to do the practicality and holding true to values that we like the most in this country and so i cant say ill ever be a Benjamin Franklin but if i wake up eave morning and say what should i aspire to be issue read Ben Franklins autobiography. Host Matthew Foley from indianapolis email. Very much enjoyed your book on franklin. Been a number of years since i read it but i recall you writing that during the revolution and the latter part of franklins life there was animosity towards franklin from many of his peers. I recall this animosity continued past his death and it took a number of years before he was appreciated. Guest yes. The happens to everybodys reputation in public life, more so now than back then because with all of our media you can be tore down pretty quickly. Franklin was somebody who was very much a compromiser. He believed that compromisers may not make great heroes but they make great democracy. So there were passionate people on either side who felt he was too willing to compromise. Secondly franklin rubbed a few people the wrong way because just of his jovial personality bringing people together. So i think anybody who is powerful wellrespected greatest scientist of his ear roo, greatest diplomat of his era, a great statesman, you have people who resist evidence him and he was not the most profound of our thinkeres. He was not madison, not jefferson. And so there was a genial surface quality to him that i argue in the last chapter of the book ran much deeper that the ability to say we should all the collegiality and working together is the essence of what america is about. Some people felt that was a shallow and even a mark twain or others disparage the autobiography of ben franklin, how to succeed how to win friends, how to influence people side of ben franklin. I think it goes deeper to that and i tree to show that. Host ann in california you are the first call for Walter Isaacson. Caller yes. Ive been reading the innovators eye and trying too figure out if theres any particular symbolism behind the design of the cover over cover of the book snooze no. I wish steve jones helped more. I wanted to show interconnected. I wanted to show that people wove together. I wanted to make it feel a bet creative but also show some of the pictures but there was not a grand secret design but thank you for ask. Host four people on the cover. Guest theres ada lovelace of course, at the very top. Steve jobs, bill gates, and then allen touring. Theyre about 30 main characters in the innovatorsbut those four i felt were the ones that inspired me. Host bill, portland, oregon good morning to you, your on with Walter Isaacson. Caller good morning, thank you, cspan for taking my question. And i appreciate you mr. Walter isaacson, and i think youre a great man. And i guest i write about great people. I dont think i can caller i wish you well a long life. And to keep bringing the history and icons to us common thinking folk. First, a question and just an additional question. With the server farms are Cloud Computing and 3d printing do you see that as an evan to all change or Industrial Revolution to the whole world . And my second is, when does elon musk going to talk with you . Guest yes, i see that the Cloud Computing, 3d printing mobile will have a transformative effect. Were already seeing it now. Which is really since the Industrial Revolution the way we organized work is through firms or corporations or whatever because you had to be a big company to have all of the equipment you needed to manufacture things. To distribute things to bring together the people in a working environment to do the creativity. Nowdays i think were beginning to see that anybody can be an oncall worker if they want. Whether its driving an uber or designing something really cool that stores in the cloud or uses server farms in order to instead of having their own big old servers and having to do it there, and then 3d printing so things can be manufactured in a tailored way. When lord byron was worrying about the advent of mechanical looms he thought we would be butting out the same fabric over and over. Now we can go back to the period where art artisans create what they want to and instead of having it be ms. Produced and mass marketed by mass corporations, i think the notion of Cloud Computing the notion of 3d printing the notion of Ondemand Services will allow people to be more entrepreneurial, create especially if we get Digital Currency that allow easier transactions and sales online that allow people to create on their own rather than being part of Large Industrial organizations. Host richard in palm springs, california. Go ahead with your question or comment for Walter Isaacson. Caller mr. Isaacson, its fast nitting listening to you. I have two questions. First, where would you place Stephen Hawking in relation to einstein and you mentioned the imitation game. Of course the theory of everything is also another film about Stephen Hawking, and secondly in the imitation game, ellen touring was having a problem with charles dancers character, until his request got to Winston Churchill and churchill signed off on it, and i have read that Winston Churchill loved these sort of slightly outside the box ideas, the bouncing bomb, and all those different inventions of world war ii. Will you talk about Winston Churchill, who i personally regard as the greatest figure of the 20th century. Thank you very much. Guest absolutely. Im going to wind the tape because i forgot to talk about elon musk as well. So ill do elon musk and steven hawking and Winston Churchill. I interviewed elon musk. I was on stage with him. I admire the way elon musk is doing inknow vacation because its easier to do innovation in the Information Technology and Digital Space because theres less regulation. You can do it in a garage or dorm room, create facebook or apple. But doing Something Like cars or batteries or rocket ships, that requires a larger degree of collaboration and a higher degree of difficulty because we have so many regulations its hard to innovate in those fields. So his ability to think outside of the box is something i deeply admire. Stephen hawking. Stephen hawking is somebody ive also deeply admired and we wrote about in and i spend time dealing with at Time Magazine. He takes a a strange thing about einsteins theory of general relativity, which einstein was uncomfortable with at first, if the equations are true you could have black holes. All of a sudden, even gravity everything comes in on itself and like asing singularity and Stephen Hawking hemmed us understand how that works. I see him as one of the great thinkers of our time and i love the movie about him. And finally, Winston Churchill. The good thing about churchill is he encouraged out of the box thinking. Somebody who did indeed, as the movie shows the movie simply identifies it agent built but when the letter comes in saying we need these resources, churchill understands how important it is. However, as much as i admire churchill, talk about him being the greatest figure of the 20th century. When i was at Time Magazine we had to pick the person of the century. We spent five years doing conversations, working on it, public event, to discuss it. It came down to four or five people. If you thought it was a century of great political struggles against communism against naziism, fascism, then you have people like Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill who stand up. Also a century of civil rights, where women and blacks and colonial people all get their own individual rights, and then gandhi or Martin Luther king as far as that. And finally, you think it as century in which science and technology took us to the moon and Everything Else. Einstein to me, his fingerprints are on it. We ended going with einstein, and one thing that sort of in some ways cut against structure as much as i admire himhe was on he wrong side of history when it came to colonial rights when it came to the rights of everything from blacks and women and his clash with gandhi was legion and in the end, the side of history was towards more individual and civil rights and empowerment, and churchill, who was ahead of every game when it came to fighting communism, fighting naziism, he is sort of caught behind on that one. So when we look at history, we admire the strength of great people but we also have to look at gee where did they turn out not to be as right as they could have been . Host how much conversation about Albert Einstein being person of the century. Guest i was interested in einstein when i was studying him to say person of the century. I realized there was no biography of him written since his papers became available, and no biography pure to the end chronological biography written in english. It realize it i would be fun to write a biography of him. Obviously you can probably tell from things ive said that my vote in the end as much as i like churchill and gandhi and Franklin Roosevelt and king my vote was for einstein because some centuries become remembered. Maybe five six, ten new jersey from now will be remembered for huge advances in science. The fact we went to the moon. The fact we invented the microchip, the computer the internet. That we had an entire new revolution that was based on Digital Technology on splitting the atom on the way elooktrons dance on elooktrons dance on the surface space of conducting material. All of that creates a revolution just like the 18th century with Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, was a century of states craft and revolution that was political, and just as other new jersey will be remembered for other things. So i came down on the side of einstein. Host you were the editor at the time guest well i we went up to hyde park. Certainly went to churchills war rooms in england. We had fun exploring this. I read all of gandhi. I went to south africa where gandhi started. I loved to soak myself into the history of that, and a great debate. Obviously no right answer. Thats why its interesting i kept saying, steve jobs would say the journey is the reward, meaning instead of the destination. Not sow much einstein the destination being the award. The able to talk it through and we did for two years in our magazine, have people talk through what matters . What will matter a century from now . What will matter ten centuries from now . And you could come down on churchill chore churchill or franklin and be just at right but the conversation was a fun one to have. Host bernie in howard beach new york, youre on with Walter Isaacson on booktv. Caller thank you. Mr. Isaacson, i enjoyed the kissinger book very much. I havent seen the touring film. Id like you to help me out. I know basically the geometry of the enigma machines, electronic and mechanical device. So two people want to communicate, so the one who wants to send the message, he uses hissing anything ma machines to put his enigma machines to put his message in the cipher and the one who wants to decipher has to have the identical member and settings to decipher it. Guest what happens is this is the enigma machine the code changes each day for how you cipher it. They only have they show this in the movie 24 hours to be able to break exactly what the deciphering that the letter w in the code actually refers to the letter p or something, and there were multiple rotors so very difficult to break the code for which letter food for what. A few thing that helped them is part of the process was no letter could stand for itself. So w couldnt be representative of w. But it was still very hard to break until they realized there were certain phrases they could use. Now, one thing the movie does not show fully that i think is important, is that the breaking the enigma code dog by the bombe, was an electromechanical device with rotors inch the movie they show him building an electronic device, one that uses vacuum tubes and that was called colossus. It was not an electromechanical device. Was a device that use electronic circuits to do it. That was something that wasnt really built by allen touring. Even though his ideas and he was part of the whole team, his ideas were used on it. Many people like max newman who was a professor at came bridge, who helped do it. So its good to read. I hope the andrew hodgess enigma book or read the chapter in my book that talks about how colossus which is one of the first allelectronic computers was built. Host nance in la grange georgia, hi nancy. Caller hi, thank you and good afternoon. Its a great honor to speak with mr. Isaacson. I called to ask if he is aware of james lovelaces relates to the discussion he had about franklin and voltaire and i wonder if he is aware of voltaires and how that was british unitarian minister who said the purpose of miracles is to prevents the knee for miracles. Host why is this of interest to you. Gus baas of the fossil water in the aqua fer. The debate between the American Philosophical Society about voltaires theory of spontaneous is because of sea shells in the andes and jefferson didnt think it was a miracle. He did this before the plate tectonics and im concerned about protecting the water in the aqua fer but down in the last ice age, 10 to 12,000 years ago, and i think were living as a similar time now, and james love locke british biologist and ologist, has posited that the earth the name for the earth is gia, and he thinks we have developed these Communications Systems which i cant use. I have naoto sensitive enlens see host nancy, well leave it there. Guest i think that if you look at Einstein Jefferson and franklin they were why the fossils were Leonardo Da Vinci figures its out too. Its not just miracles. Its natural explanation. The important thing in life is not to debunk natural explanations but try to appreciate the beauty. There was something we used the word mesmerized. There was something mesma was a person that believed that the french king asked ben franklin to do a test. Mesmer right and you have this magnetic forces that are super natural, and franklin just does a controlled study, doesnt tell people which trees were quote, mesmerized and which werent. He said theres a natural explanation, its not some strange mystery. So i think although we can appreciate the beauty of life we should always look for natural explanations. Host rob is in fairfield connecticut. Hi robb. Caller hi, peter. I hope you and mr. Isaacson will find it amusing that my minored niece and my stenin other words nephew are constantly debating when the is more boring, when uncle robby watches booktv or their father watches golf. But my question to you, mr. Isaacson i am a secular agnostic European American and i cant figure out how Martin Luther king or other social leaders have impacted my life positively, one half of one percent. And i just wonder if you think if you could comment if we as a country, perhaps because of guilt, place an inordinate amount of import on social leaders as opposed to the salk, the henry padreses, the steve jones, the bill gates and im ashamed to say i dont know the man or women who created chemotherapy and radiation. If you would comment. Guest when it was at time Time Magazine i felt that political leaders got on the cover but it was odd that the person who invenned television, whether it you can debate that was never a cover of time, or the people and sew thats what why i wanted to make andy grove when he was iraning intel man of the year, or david oh would created medical treatment that involved aids and Combination Therapies or the people who sequenced the jean genome because to me these people are as important in affecting our lives. So, when we were looking for persons of the century, as i described, you have to look at great political and social leaders, great scientific leader as well as great political and military leaders. All play a part but in my write little especially after i did ben franklin who i began writing about as a diplomat and states crafter and i realize head was a really good scientist. We also have to look at the scientists and technologists and engineers of the internet and the computer are the two most important inventions 0 our time. Theyre changing our lives more than most any other thing that is happening. And yet most people do not know who invented them. So my book the inmotivators says this is how the internet was invented. Or Search Engines or whatever it is was invented. So i think its important to celebrate those people as much as we might celebrate a political leader or a social leader. Bonny lincoln, ford myers, florida, email. You say one of your strengths as a biographer is your able to listen. Im curious, hough did you listen to ben franklin and Albert Einstein . Guest the great thing about Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein, they wrote letters every single day. And as i said earlier you can go online and just search einstein papers project, and youll see every letter he wrote, dozens, in a given day and the papers he wrote, and so if you go chronologically, and back then before it was online. Guest so conversations happen not just by interviews. One of the things i learned writing about kissinger the wise men and others you read the documents theyll give you part of the picture. Then you interview people and they say, oh yeah heres the real reason i wrote it to herriman or heres the real reason that memo to Henry Kissinger was that way. So it helps to combine Archival Research with oldfashioned journalistic interviews. And as i said i may not be the best journalist, and im certainly not the best archival historian, but i was able and have been able, i hope to combine the two to read the documents and then do the interviews. Host hakim is in san jose california. Hi hakim. Caller hello. Thank you for taking my call. Something very insightful that mr. Isaacson, you said, we need to rethink institutions such as nato and think outside the box for currentday applications. I used to volunteer with the late doug franco, James Francos father, and he would say we would do orphan Development Projects in highconflict rural areas, and he would often say orphan development is the front line on the war on terror. What are your thoughts about these types of approaches towards leading with peace initiatives . Guest absolutely. And, by the way we did that at the beginning of the cold war. We didnt just create nato, we did the International Monetary fund and the world bank. But also all sorts of social organizations around the world World Health Organizations Development Groups and u. N. Development projects. At the Aspen Institute, we have a middle east investment initiative, for example, that helps palestinians and others in the muslim world create Small Businesses often with loan guarantees or loans from the israeli banks so that you get people working together. This is something Benjamin Franklin understood in nebraska. It wasnt just about in philadelphia. It wasnt just about big organizations, it was about people getting together to form civil corps or militia or a Lending Library that could be done that way. I think as we fight this new global struggle, it really helps i just met sue Desmond Hammond whos the new head of the bill and Melinda Gates foundation. The Development Work that the Gates Foundation is doing on world health the types of things i hope we at the Aspen Institute are doing on creating, you know empowerment of people around the world through nongovernmental organizations, i think thats part of the forefront of winning a war that demands we win both hearts and minds and the loyalties of people feeling theres an opportunity in this world that i can be a part of. Host what is the Aspen Institute . Guest the Aspen Institute is sort of like a think tank. We have 30 policy organizations that look at everything from education reform to relations with russia to, you know, strategy grooms, arms control groups, arms control environment, energy. Its also a lineup institute where we have a Young Leaders program around the world starting about a dozen in the United States in different fields, and we bring Young Leaders together to try to come to Common Ground based on pragmatic, factbased, you know things, to be nonpartisan. And whether its Rodel Program that hats half democrats, half republicans working together on projects, or a Henry Crown Program who bring entrepreneurs and Business Leaders together to find sense bl solutions sensible solutions to our problems, we try to turn thought into action. So its basically a think tank in which we groom Young Leaders to turn thought into action. Host founded guest 1949 by a group of chicago industrialists. And, you know, one of the earlier questions was talking about dont you like scientists, technologists, engineers as well as political leaders, we also have to realize that like steve jobs and others, industrialists, Business Leaders, people like bob noyce who helped start intel that its good to look at the business and Entrepreneurial Community too. So there were these Business Leaders in chicago in the late 1940s who realized at the beginning of the cold war you not only neated nato needed nato, but you needed think tanks that would look at democratic values, the values of free minds and free markets, and figure out how those would help make a better world. And that group of Business Leaders, led by walter pepke who ran Container Corporation of america, henry crown of the crown family, they helped create an institute that would look at our values and how they could, you know, help shape a better world. Host howd you get the name . Guest it has a campus in aspen, colorado, which is useful and confuses people because were here in washington doing this show our headquarters is actually in washington. But one of the glories, one of the hundreds of glories of being part of the Aspen Institute is that when it gets really hot in washington in june july august, most of our programs are done on the campus in colorado in aspen. Host Walter Isaacson is the ceo of the Aspen Institute also an author and biographer, and weve got a little over an hour to go with our quest. But every guest whos on in depth we ask what theyre reading, some of their influences. Heres a look at mr. Isaacsons answers. Host Walter Isaacson, who is walker percy . Is. Guest he was one of my original heroes mentor, uncle of a friend of mine, ugging by uncle by marriage. We called him uncle walker. We used to go across lake pontchartrain in new orleans where i group, and percy was a friend of ours. We couldnt figure out what anns dad did. Whats your dad do . A writer. And it wasnt until the movie goer came out in the early 960s 1960s, and i was 9 or 10 years old, and i go oh a writer thats something you can be when you grow up just like a fibberman, a doctor an engineer. And and so i took sort of an enter in, you know, dr. Percy, uncle walker. And, you know, i would sit there, and id sort of read his books and say, well theyre sort of deep, philosophical religious messages, especially in the moviegoer the last gentleman. And hed say things like, you know walter, there are two types of people that come out of louisiana; preachers and storytellers. He said, for gods sake be a storyteller, the worlds got too much preachers. So he wouldnt answer my questions. Hed say do it to the story the way the bible does it which is not just commandmentses, its storytelling. And he said the storytelling is the most effective way to get across the type of things your interested in. Youre interested in. So he became somebody i deeply, deeply admired and, of course every couple of years id just reread the moviegoer which is one of the greatest of all times. Host somebody youre currently writing, dave eggers, hes new orleansconnected, isnt he . Guest well, he came down after the storm. And if youre from new orleans you say to yourself ill judge people by what they did after katrina. Eggers comes down he writes a great book that involves two of the characters coming out of the hurricane. But i admired dave eggers whos not from new orleans well before the hurricane. When i was at time mag he went to cuba for us once. I think bicycled around cuba and reported on it. And then when his book, a heartbreaking work of staggering genius came out about his helping to raise prison brother after his parents his brother after his parents die,like, wow, a voice our generation can relate to. So so if i had to pick novels including the circle, hologram to the king, the circle came out a bit of a warning over the use of overreliance of the digital revolution. Those of us who love the digital revolution have two or three devices at all times and watch you follow a twitter feed is like thats great, but its good to read a novel like the circle that says okay, lets take a little bit more detached view of all of this. Host whats it like to grow up in new orleans . What is it about new orleans . Guest new orleans has a creativity that comes from a diversity of people. Ben franklin goes wow, theres quakers and anglicans and jews and that makes for creativity. New orleans you had that, you know triplefold. You had in my neighborhood of broadmore in central city right in the heart of the city a very mixed neighborhood mixed economically mixed racially mixed ethnicically, and you realized the same neighborhood that is 00 100 years before Louis Armstrong had grown up in that neighborhood, one of the Great Central streets in new orleans. And Louis Armstrong growing up there is influenced by, you know, the great french Opera Singers and also the slaves coming back from the plantations singing, you know, spirituals. But also the sang the uhuhfied church sanctified church, people coming back from the spanishamerican war so that a jewish family in that neighborhood could help them get a horn out of hock and Start Playing the trumpet. You know, complicated family life. And you see in that questionersty what do you get . You get diversity, what do you get . You get jazz. Buddy bolden kid oliver and all of a sudden hes doing a 17bar riff to open west end blues, and you say, whoa, where did that come from . It comes from being exposed to a diversity of interests and talents and musical influences and thats also true of the food of new orleans. I just carpal back my came back my wife and i go quite often, just came back last week, and just looking at the creativity of the restaurants the architecture. You say, okay, i didnt think the city would come back after the storm. Its been ten years now. Weve been creative about the school system, creative about a entrepreneurial economy. Places like idea village that Tim Williamson started there which is an incubator for cool people who just wanted to create. And i think that the next wave of entrepreneurship and innovation comes not just from Information Technology or Digital Technology, but connecting the Creative Industries and arts to Digital Technology. Theater, that becomes him mersive and interactive. Immersive and interactive. Food and music i new forms of it that we can do. I see that happening in new orleans as well. Host phone lines are all jammed. Well put the numbers up just in case and well also put up our social media addresses if you want to get in and talk with Walter Isaacson. Ben franklin, the autobiography, one great moral issue historians must wrestle with when assessing americas founders is slavery, and franklin was wrestling with it as well. Slaves made up about 6 of philadelphias population at the time, and franklin had facilitated the buying and selling of them through ads in his newspaper. Guest yep. In the pennsylvania gazette when he first started it, you can see ads for buying and selling of slaves. He even owned, ben franklin did, two households of slaves. And when you look at jefferson, who was a big slave owner thats what youve got to wrestle with. The thing where the ben franklin bookends and his life ends is that everybody makes deep moral mistakes at times. I said that Ben Franklins strength was that he knew how to compromise, knew i how to, you know, at the Constitutional Convention as he said shave a little from one side of the joint and another until you had a piece of wood that would hold together for centuries. He compromised on slavery as they do in the constitution, and he realizes thats a deep flaw a mistake he had made. Because hes introspeck ty. Introspective. Thats what we all have to learn. Gee, i know some mistakes ive made, neither my greatness nor my mistakes are high or half as low as ben franklin, but he did that from the very beginning of his life. He kept a ledger and i mean a real one where he made a chart of every error mistake or moral mistake that he made. And then on the righthand side how he had rectified it. So, for example i think it begins with running away from his brothers print shop in boston because he was apprentice to his brother james and he was not allowed to leave. When youre assigned an apprenticeship, you had so stay throughout before you could leave. He runs away secretly because he doesnt want to work for his brother james. He calls that an error, a moral lapse. He rectifies it when james dice, benjamin dies Benjamin Franklin provides for the education of james kids. But at the very end theres the big one, he had tolerated and compromised on slavery. Of course, he feels this is an error, but very old to, late in life i think he was about 80 he becomes the president of the society for the abolition of slavery. And his last great piece, he always wrote hoaxes and jokes and parodies, was a piece called the speech by the divine of algiers which was about a leader in algiers explaining why he was putting white europeans into slavery in algiers, and it was palleting all the arguments, but also ridiculing. It was a brutal piece against the arguments that were being made in congress to justify slavery. So this is how he tries to rectify a deep moral error. And when you get to the compare and contrast franklin and jefferson, you know, jefferson never quite gets it jeffersons from virginia, franklins from pennsylvania maybe its a little easier. But still as brilliant as jefferson was he doesnt get to that same moral place that ben frank does of being a franklin does of being appalled that he had compromised on the issue of slavery and tries to rectify it. Host wise men, coauthor evan thomas, came out in 1986. Kissinger biography, 1992. Benjamin franklin an American Life 03. Ion tine is 07. Steve jobs, 2011. Walter isaacsons recent book is the innovators how a group of hackers, geniuses and geeks created the digital revolution. Somebodys going to buy one of your books wants to read it, which one do you suggest . Guest you know, now a days we talk about ben franklin being the person i relate to the most, if you want to sort of understand the role you can play in your civic life and in pulling people together, you know, when i graduated from college i didnt remember who my graduation speaker was, but there was a minister in the memorial church, and he gave a sermon could what we called what we forgot to tell you. We told you that this was an exclusive college, and you got into classes that were very exclusive and probably clubs that were exclusive, but what we forgot to tell you is that life was about inclusion, and you will be judged about how many people you bring together not how many you exclude. That was the point of Ben Franklins life. Somebody who was able to bring people, different races creeds together into a sense of civic, you know, community. And so to me, thats still the most important lesson. You know during his lifetime he donated to the Building Fund of each and every church that was built in philadelphia, and at one point they were building a new hall for wayward wandering preachers of the great awakening. And so he writes a fundraising document. He says even if the must havefy of constantinople were to send someone here to preach islam to us, we should offer a pulpit, and we should listen for we might learn. On his deathbed, hes the largest contributor of the synagogue in philadelphia. So when he dies instead of his minister accompanying his casket linked arms with the rabbis, the jew and marched with him to the grave. That was the secret sauce of the nation we were crating back then. One of creating back then. One of inclusion. And thats what were still fighting for whether it be in paris, in syria, in ferguson today. And so to me, hes the inspiring of how do you live your life. Obviously, einstein if you want to understand the beauty, the spiritual beauty of the elegance of the laws that are manifest in the that manifest itself in the universe, einstein. And steve jobs if you want to know how to really make a dent in that universe by having a passion for making beautiful products, thats steve jobs. So obviously like your kids you like all the books. But theres a certain partiality if youre going to say how can i make my little world a better place, id start by reading ben franklin. Host whats your next book . Guest you know ive always been there are two books im juggling with, and maybe people can be by twitter tell me what to do. I really like this notion, i talked about new orleans, where diverse strands and people come together and thats how creativity occurs. Like ben franklin would want when we respect different you get jazz whatever. And to me, the tale of Louis Armstrongs life is a tale of creativity born of a love for different influences and diversity, and its a life of the arts but just connected to a lot more. I have trouble can ive studied armstrong. As i say i played growing up, so i played with some people who played jazz with Louis Armstrong, so you feel a kinship, but im still not sure i fully understand whether he was happy. The other which is going into the way back machine for a while would be the ultimate connection of arts and engineering, the ultimate connection of the person with science and the person of the humanity, and that, of course, is Leonardo Da Vinci who the man in the circle thats the symbol of the connection that we in my mind the symbol of the connection between the arts and the sciences. And that, to mel, is such and he left so many notebooks and so many drawings that geeking out on those notebooks and seeing how he thought of himself as an engineer and how he did autopsies and anatomy on cadavers, but how thats reflected in each of the paintings he does, to me, thats an exciting thing too. Host we just learned Walter Isaacson is writing two books one on Leonardo Da Vinci, one on Louis Armstrong. Cat in wyoming, you have kathy in wyoming, you have been very patient. Go ahead. Henry kissinger was interpreted this week and not surprisingly john mccain called the protesters low life scum while demanding their removal. I think activists are some of the greatest people of our time. Do you see this protest as did you see this protest, and and do you have any comments about it. And what do you think about nonprosecution of warmongers . Thank you. Guest sure. I, obviously, saw it on tv. I was not sitting there. I think that the ability, you know starting with people like thomas paine to people today in our society to protest and have free speech and our comfort with protest and free speech that makes us a stronger society. And you look at societies like china where the free flow of information or protests, free flow of ideas is too much repressed and censored, never be successful in the digital age. I do think that was an unfortunate approach to protests, that we certainly have better ways than sort of making a piece of dumb, in my mind theater against, you know george schultz, Madeleine Albright Henry Kissinger sitting there. I think that there are ways to express and study ones feeling about kissingers decisions. I do not think he was a warmonger, but even if i did i would hope i would find a better way to try to convince others of that than doing that i think not very useful bit of theater. And i did, you know, i did admire and read the testimony of Henry Kissinger. And if youre looking for books to read and you want to understand kissinger where hes really coming from read world order. Its a great book. You may say well, hes a warmonger. No be, heres a structure of thought that leads to his sense of what makes for a stable good order, and you can disagree with it, but then push back intellectually instead of this thing that i found kind of disturbing. Host david is calling in from st. Thomas, virgin islands. David, youre on with Walter Isaacson. Caller mr. Isaacson, i am a new fan since i saw you on booktv the other day. If youll indulge me for a moment, id like to make a quick comment to our friends in connecticut, scientists create Technology Social leaders and artists teach us what to do with the technology. Guest uhhuh. Caller id like to go on with my question. I feel much at least the last several millennia of Human History have been about deevolution of power from more to individuals. As we become more thoroughly interfaced with our technology, as we move toward becoming sigh borks, i guess how cyborgs i guess, how do we protect ourselves from losing our individual uniqueness in that process . Guest i think you answered your question in the very beginning of the statement which is its the humanities and the arts that make us unique. One of the things about that alan turing movie, in the end hes a human. In the end, he has his own creativity. And so the end of the innovators, theres a chapter about this. I also did a lecture the jefferson lecture last year which is the importance of connecting the humanityies to the sciences. Why . Because its about the importance of connecting humanness to our machines instead of letting our machines sort of run away without us. A lot of people fearing Artificial Intelligence singularity, the robots taking over. But as long as we understand our connection our interfacing with our machines, i think our creativity our art our moral sensibilities, those are the things we have to understand. And to understand the moral aesthetics and sensibility, it really helps to understand the humanities and the arts. Host athe tila bay posts on our facebook page, of your books which do you find teaches most about learning about culture or a culture . Guest well, the Benjamin Franklin invents a new form of culture, a culture in which theres a tolerance of people different religions backgrounds, ethnic groups to create a democracy based on individual liberty that also has a spirit of community to it. Thats one of the strands of america, and i even think tocqueville didnt fully get it right. He thought our forming of associations was in conflict with our individuality. Ben franklin knew that our individuality and our ability to come together to form militias and streetsweeping corps and libraries and hospitals, that was a core of a new form of culture. But to me if i had to answer in another way, the very interesting cultural situation is when einstein is in germany wrestling with general relativity. That comes after the 905 1905 miracle of special relativity. He now wants to tie gravity into it. He wants to make it a way to tie in the whole forces of the universe and have a neary of gravity that relate a theory of gravity that relates to even space and time. The grandest and most elegant of all theories. But hes doing it in germany as a jew when antisemitism is rising. Hes a member of the prussian academy, but hes gotten hes split from his wife hes being ostracized more and more by attacks on what is called jewish science. And so watching that drama as from 1914 to 1915 with the 100th anniversary now of general relativity which is 915 and, as i say, the most elegant theory in my mind of all of science, as he marches to that great theory with these huge social forces sort of pushing in on him, racing to get that theory right. To me thats the most dramatic period the summer of 1915, when all of this is happening in germany, all of this is happening in europe. And hes trying to figure out the spirit manifests in the laws of the universe. Host another facebook comment being in the field of Science Education both as an educator and researcher, im always puzzled how little emphases is placed on history and philosophy of science innovations in primary and secondary school education. What are your thoughts on this issue and how that might help students pursue science . Guest i think its a great question because ive come to believe that one of the best ways to teach science and to teach the human the cities is through the history of humanities is through the history of science. Starting with the scientific revolution. Starting with galileo kepler and others as they start doing experiments and they test certain theories and copernicus comes along. Reflect with our religious convictions that, you know, the sun revolves around the earth as opposed to a solar system or whatever. And then seeing how the Scientific Method has progressed all the way through, helps teach us how to think, helps teach us how society progresses, but also how to combine an appreciation for the humanities for that matter religion art, you know whatever particularly is important to you. How that gets reconciled with science my daughter, shes trying to figure out what to major in and the college has a great history of science department, and she mailed me and said i didnt know science had a history. But now that i look at the history of science, i see how we build on things ask how there is a method and how there is a method that then as id said about frank lin and jefferson can be transferred to how we make a constitution, how we make a democratic system, how we make a society. So i think an appreciation for the history of science is something that our society, you know should grab onto more. And it may be the coolest way to teach. You know, we do teach physics. We teach biology whatever. But if you want to understand where biology is going and where it came from read the double helix by watson and craig. That wonderful, you know, rushing into the eagle pub in cambridge having decoded the dna and announcing it to the other people in the pub, that gives you an excitement of science but it also helps you figure out how human creativity can decode the structure of dna. Host youve mentioned betsy, your daughter, who introduced you to ada lovelace, but you also in all of your books mention a woman named kathy. Guest oh my wife. You know, shes got the most common sense of everybody, and she is the first and last reader of every book, you know, when i do the first draft and before i turn in the last draft. And, you know, theres a when you connect the humanities, kathys somebody who, you know, shes been a lawyer, but she works on the washington womens foundation, new york womens foundation, you know helping other people. That notion of being engaged in society is always helpful when youre trying to write a biography and say how will that connect to other people in society . Host facebook comment in the wise men you write about the mesh establishment american establishment. Is there an establishment mentality today . If so, what is it, in your opinion . Who or what determines those within this blushment . Guest yeah, there is an establishment mentality, and i mean that neither to elevate it, nor to denigrate it. Theres a general consensus that i would call, you know, we have some at the Aspen Institute, the Aspen Strategy Group. Our Aspen Strategy Group is run by brent sew craft who was george bush the elders National Security adviser and a great professor at harvard, bill nye. But likewise, council on foreign relations, the various sort of established view of the world which believes in free minds, free markets a liberal democracy. It believes in balancing a realist view of Foreign Policy meaning what are our national interests, and say if were going to talk about ukraine and russia, is this the best place to assert it . Is there a balance we can do with russia . How do we get out of this . With an idealistic approach to Foreign Policy which is we want a democracy. We want, we want to fight against people who are tyrannical. So that wrestling with a balance between idealism and realism and with interventionism versus a more humble Foreign Policy, you could see that happening in the american establishment. The good thing about United States is the establishment is always being challenged. So whether its, you know a ted cruz or, you know, a rand paul in the Republican Party or in the Democratic Party people who are more against the general consensus that led us to a lot of interventions, some of which i thought were misguided in the past 15 years including, in my opinion i may be wrong you know, the invasion of iraq. I thought that was a misguided and ended up being miscalculated but also not thought through enough. So challenging the establishment view. And by the way, the american Foreign Policy establishment from democrats and republicans were generally in favor of the invasion of iraq. That was a mistake. So that says, hey, we need outsiders who are going to challenge that view. Say what are we thinking . Why are we getting into this . So the balance between an establishment view which the wise men represented in the late 1940s and the outsideers, this is why democracy tends to be so much better even thats one of my criticisms of Henry Kissinger is he doesnt realize thats the strength of democracy, when people from the outside get to challenge you and get to say no, what are you doing . Why are you going into cambodia vietnam, those type of things . That, to me, makes democracy stronger at waging Foreign Policy. Host the wise men, of the six how many did you to get to talk to . Guest well, George Kennon very much so. Chip bolan was no longer alive. Spent a lot of time with john mccloy who was, you know died right as the book came out. But he gave great interviews. Likewise with avril hairyman. And i remember at the end as we were finishing the book, his wife would let us sit by his bed and talk about and lovett, Mccloy Herriman and kennon bolan and acheson had both died. Obviously, i talked to a lot of bolan and achesons children and colleagues. But working with evan thomas my coauthor on that book, we were both journalists. Once again it was a chance to look at archives look at all the letters. Acheson im sorry, herriman and lovett who were both the Brown Brothers herriman when lovett and hairyman were then going into government, wrote each other twice a day. So you got the conversation in the letters, and then you could go to governor herriman and say, okay what did you mean about this thing on laos when you wrote the lovett . And so one of the things evan and i were able to do in writing that book was combine the ability to go to the archives, New York Historical society had the Brown Brothers herriman archives. Also then go to the people and say who were involved and say when you got that letter what were you really aiming at . And thats why i like this intersection that ive been able to be part of between the journalistic approach to history and an archival academic approach to history. Host are we losing some of that with todays technology . Guest oh yeah. Host often people email a couple times a day. Guest look, i remember sitting at steve jobs house and i said what about the emails when you were first coming back to apple, 1997 98 . Hugely dramatic period. You didnt write letters, you didnt keep a journal. Your memorys pretty good, but you know, all memorys are bad and maybe yours, you know whatever. He said, yeah, i got those emails and it was the next computer. He had it in his house. And he in and all sorts of techies tried to figure out how do we get access to these emails that were composed on a you nixbased unixbased operating system, and he couldnt even get those emails. So i stoims talk to archivists nowadays. We did something at harvard that john hue by and others did which is to try to get oral histories but also get peoples emails. I went back to my emails from the early 1990s, and after four or five techies helped me, i found all the emails where we were arguing with cbs and trying to create pathfinder and roadrunner and broadband systems. I said heres all my emails but i would hope that University Libraries when they get the papers of bill gates, they get the papers of arthur rock lets say, who started Venture Capital in the west coast, they say we not only need your papers but give us all your Old Computers we want to save your emails. Because i worry were not archiving emails very well. I just read an unbelievably good good piece last night by jill lepore in the new yorker about the internet archive which id always admired but never quite knew how it worked. And these are people who are this in San Francisco but now in consortiums around world archiving every, you know, youre looking at your twitter feed. Well look when twitter is affecting the events in ferguson or the events in tahrir square, how are we going to the get those tweets 50 years from now when were writing about what really happened . How are we going to get those email, those facebook pages, how are we going to get even the web pages that somebody may have put up when its 50 years from now and god knows where they are . So i think we have to have a real effort to archive peoples emails voluntarily, you know . Not like the nsa may be archiving our emails when we dont want them to. But if youre donating your papers and youre bill gates, make sure your emails a part of it. And if were trying to archive all the newspapers lets also archive the twitter. Twitter is doing that now, but facebook and all the web pages. People should read jill lepores piece host and, of course jill lepore was a National Book finalist last year for her biography on jane frank lin. The sister. Guest yeah, jane, the sister of ben franklin. And this is the cool thing, they wrote letters all the time. So you have the letters ben franklin is writing to the French Foreign minister but you also have the letters hes writing jane talking about, you know, what hes doing. And, of course, thats a different conversation. And its great the way. She has tried to create a biography even though we dont know much about jane, but create a biography that is based on the letters to her brother and from her brother. Host elizabeth in willowby ohio, youve been very patient. Youre on with Walter Isaacson. Caller thank you. First of all, you have to do innovators, part two. I theres a lot of information that you have been covering in innovators that i really am looking forward to reading about especially the women in i. T. Guest right, right. Caller having studied i. T. , i know its hard for us to get into it, first of all. The second thing is maybe i would like to see that book on da vinci because after taking a math class and i. T. Classes and an art class sometimes all at the same time, im beginning to understand we dont understand the interaction between the arts music and engineering. And the other half of our lives. Guest absolutely. And when mozart i mean, when einstein is trying to do general relativity as i described before in 1914,15 and all hell is breaking loose, he believes that mozarts chords help him connect with the harmonies of the universe. Ben franklin is that way. Ada lovelace, as i said earlier is great at connecting art to science. Leonardo is the greatest. But you get back to the part two of the innovators i mean one problem, you know, with the innovators and criticism of it is every day i get four or five letters saying you left out, you know seymour clay or you left out the people who did basic at dartmouth, whatever. I would like to someday have a multimedia crowdsourced open source book maybe with a digital royalty system in which people take a book like the innovators, and thats there you know, as the foundation, but they write are other chapters like ornaments that they put on. They say, you know heres what happened at bell labs or xerox park, or heres what happened you know, with this innovator i worked with who was doing supercomputers at mit or carnegie mellon. All these people have written in saying heres a story you didnt put in and then somehow or another have a way to crowd source but also let an author cure rate a living and grow book. I hope we have that and i hope thats an innovation well have in five years or so especially if theres a way to have a bitcoin or cyber currency that allows anybody who creates something for a book like that to get a piece of the royalties or a piece of the payments for the book. Host and theres one vote so far for da vinci. Well see how this crowd source goes in the next 40 minutes. Alan in fullerton, california youre on booktv on cspan2 with Walter Isaacson. Caller thank you. Thank you for taking my call. Guest thank you. Caller thank you mr. Isaacson, for the wonderful books and helping us understand a little bit more about the people that are shaping the way we live. Look forward to the next book. In your opinion is there another trait or characteristic that all these innovators share something that in your view transcends time, space background gender . I feel that they innovate in spite of all the turmoil and all the stuff thats going on around there, they just challenge that. Guest right. Caller what is your opinion . Thank you. Guest i think there are a couple of traits that are important as different as ben franklin is from a steve jobs. They both have a rebellious they all do. I mean, einstein runs away from high school, Benjamin Frank lin does steve jobs drops out of college. Maybe thats why i dont get asked to speak at a lot of graduations, because most of the people i seem to know run away or drop out. So they have a rebellious spirit to it. Steve captured, steve jobs captured that when he comes back to apple and had to write a manifesto that becomes a television ad. And you may remember it, heres to the crazy ones, the misfits the rebels, the round pegs in the square holes. The people who think different, the people who are crazy enough to think different are the ones who do. And steve had a motto when he was doing the original mcinso much when he put up a pirate flag and said its better to be a pirate than to join the navy. I think you would find that in einstein, youd find that in franklin. That ability to question conventional thinking to think out of the box while still knowing what was in the box and to challenge conventional authority and received wisdom. That, to me, is awesomely important if youre going to be an innovator. Host Benjamin Sorenson tweets in who in todays world most closely lives up to those featured in your book . Is innovation limit less . Guest it is limitless. As i said about elon musk whos answer number one to that question its harder to do in the nondigital world than in the digital world. In other words, you can do facebook. In your dorm room i but if youre going to do things like biotech or rocket ships or batteries or electric cars, that is, you know you face a lot more regulation you face the need to not only innovation, but to collaborate, build teams and push the bounds of reality. I love what larry page is doing at bag google. I think jeff bezos is awesome because hes connecting commerce to innovation. And just like bursting out into Cloud Computing suddenly. So were all empowered to put us, you know, to create businesses in the cloud as ubm is doing as ibm, as others are doing now. But i just think bezos is truly awesome. I think Sheryl Sandberg and Mark Zuckerberg the way theyre doing facebook, a platform upon which to build things, thats really cool. I think were seeing innovation all over the place. I ran into tony friday dell yesterday, you know, he was the person who helped design the ipod. But now hes creating an internet of things where my thermostat and my garage door and my whatever it may be are all connected and i can, you know, sort of help my life become better through connecting things. So theres just enormous innovation. One interesting question is everybody ive mentioned, you know is in the u. S. Why is it were a more Innovative Society . I think because we allow people to question authority. There was a discussion about code pink earlier. I didnt like i mean, i was appalled and horrified and didnt like what the code pink people did to Henry Kissinger. But you know what . We live in a country where that happens. In china in other places there isnt as much questioning of authority, so you dont get as much innovation. Host tweet, as head of the Aspen Institute, who is the most fascinating speaker youve heard in the last year . Guest you know, weve had great World Leaders from tony blair to, you know, shimon peres, hillary clinton, you know people or barack obama was there before, george bush people the elder george bush have all spoken at the Aspen Institute. I find the people who are doing new things, who are at the cutting edge of say, science and policy and technology who are less well known will come to aspen ideas festival or come to our action forum or come to our strategy groups, you know like eric lander. Take him. Somebody you may not know. I hope he writes a book someday so youll have him on. But he does hes helping do, complete more sequencing of the genome at mit and hard voir harvard. But hes a humanist as well so he understands how were going of of the day that bases that are going to help us build databases that are going to help us build new drugs, but how our privacy concerns are going to be affected. We may have to have a system where we say, count me in. I want my genetic, you know, information to be shared so that people can make things or i dont want it. Those fascinate me and thats why i like being at the institute. Its not just about political stuff, its about real interesting issues where science intersects with society, policy and business that i hope we can have practical solutions. Host lee Bullhead City arizona. Please go ahead with your question or comment. Guest thank you. Took me seven calls and about an hour to get through. Host welcome. Guest second on da vinci. Okay. I want you to think of a baby for a minute. A babys born, knows nothing. Knows no language. Doesnt know house from a dog. But what they do is they watch and they listen. And as they grow older, they begin to get more curious about this and that. And i think that curiosity is the key to all these people. Some other things are the rebellion i agree with, collaborating, because you cant live on an island. Challenge all those things are true. I but i think that curiosity is the key to everything. Host lee, what do you do in Bullhead City . Caller pardon in. Host what do you do in Bullhead City . Caller im retired and ive read about 500 books in my motel room. Host from what are you retired . Caller of what am i retiring . Host from what are you retouring . Caller i dont think you got the time [laughter] the most important one to me was when i was recorder and editor for a newspaper. Guest oh, same with me. Host thank you sir. Guest you talk about curiosity, yes. That to me, is something that you see in every great innovator. Im so glad you raised it. Lets take einstein, for example. When he was about 6 years old, his father gave him a compass and he looked and the needle twitched, and it pointed north no matter how he turned it and he was mesmerized by it because nothings touching the needle, theres no particles hitting the particles in the needle. So hes trying to figure out what is a force field, you know . How does a field work like that . Now, look, you and i probably remember getting a compass when we were kids and it was like, wow, it points and then a moment or two later were like oh look a dead squirrel. And were on to something else. There was a passionate curiosity for einstein on that compass needle that when i said he was on his death bed trying to connect gravity, particle physics and relativity and all of his theories, the unified theory, it was basically still that curiosity that came from why does a compass needle twitch and point north . You can see that from Benjamin Franklin. Why does it take a ship a little less time to get to europe than to come back . And he measures the temperatures of the water as hes sailing to england for the first time, and hes able to chart the gulf stream. So how, you know, einstein worrying about why is the sky blue, things you and i might not even question or keep being curious about he questions the obvious. So if i had to list traits, i would put collaboration or, id put rebelliousness, id put a passion for perfection like steve jobs had but id also put curiosity up there. Host dean barker, new york city. This probably isnt the way to ask a question of mr. Isaacson live on booktv at the moment but if it is, heres my question. This is the way, dee barker, why does the innovators not include jack kilby in. Guest i love jack kilby, hes in the book in two different places and, i mean, jack kilbys great, plus when he gets the nobel prize, and he has such a wonderful answer when the Swedish Academy says the whole digital revolution comes from your thinking. He said it reminds me of what the weaver said to the rabbit the beaver said to the rabbit at the foot of the hoover dam which is no, i didnt build it, but its based on a idea of mine. Kilby and noyce kilby from Texas Instruments, the ability to have that rivalry and that race but then also to collaborate and Work Together, maybe the index is messed up. Is it in the index . Host yeah. Guest okay. I urge people to read about jack kilby because i truly admire his spunk, his spirit, his ability to figure out how to etch transistors on silicon. So creative. And then doing it, and they have an intellectual property dispute, you know . A trade a patent war over who did it. And it took years to get through the courts and finally people at Texas Instruments like kilby and noyce say lets just settle it, lets move on. Host yeah. Big section in the innovators. Brian in texas, youre on air. Please go ahead. Caller oh, hi, good afternoon. Just wanted to say that im really enjoying the conversation. And i wanted to the reason why im calling is id like to put a, place a suggestion to mr. Isaacson since hes the head of the Aspen Institute. And, actually, im doing it more in the way of a plea. The suggestion is this is this. The Aspen Institute focuses on developing leadership, and there are two Critical Issues that are illustrated by three books one of which you referenced in your either books that influenced you or books that youre currently reading. Well, those two areas that im thinking about are the problems that exist currently with wall street and what i specifically have in mind is the behavior that wall street engaged in that eventually resulted in the recession. The second thing and this relates to the book that you referenced is the disfunctionalty in our health care system. Guest right. Caller and there are three books that i have in mind host hey, brian, can you get to, can you list those three books so we can get some more calls in here . Caller sure. Three books that i think do a really good job analyzing this. The book americas bitter pill another book called 13 bankers by Simon Johnson and then another book called in bed with washington, i believe, by larry doyle. But i think those areas would be excellent areas for you to, you know focus host thank you. We get the point. Guest i agree with you. Stephen brills book, bitter pill, which started as a Time Magazine cover is an amazing look at the dysfunctionalty of our health care system, and i would certainly tout it and ask people to read it. I havent read the other two books. I think when it comes to the financial industry, one of the best things we could do is have a disruptive technology. You see it in bitcoin as people build coin base and block chain type systems well be automobile to have a digital and cyber currency that provide alternatives to some of the banking system. And it might enable commerce in a better way. Host george is in fort myers, florida. Hi george. Caller hi. Host george, were listening. Caller can you hear me . Host we are listening, sir. Please go ahead with your question or comment for Walter Isaacson. Caller okay. Einstein described himself as a determinist just like mark twain did. And im wondering how they got there. Guest you know, the issue of free will versus determinism is one of the richest, most difficult topics that people have wrestlinged with since plato wrestled with since plato and socrates, certainly einstein wrestles with it, certainly steve jobs wrestles with it. And im not sure anybodys ever going to resolve it. Its at the core of alan turings imitation game question which is do we have free will in a way thats different or consciousness and free will in a way thats different from a preprogrammed machine . Einstein was a determine cannist, but, of course, he wins the nobel prize for his Quantum Mechanics or quantum theory paper on the photoelectric effect which basically says that at the subatomic level things happen by chance. Theres statistics but not determine city. And theres an indetermine that city which by the way means theres an indeterm city at the basis of the universe. So einstein, as much as he likes to believe in a deterministic universe comes up with theory that says the universe may not be that way. So even einstein never cracked the issue of determinism and free will, so certainly im not going to be able to. Their certain laws that can be expressed in the equations of special and general relativity. What happens though is people who look at the theory of relativity, especially antisemitism is growing in germany think its sort of ties into april of this stick morality and you know, people who are doing art and plays and music for stravinsky were the old laws of tumbled cords are being broken and there is a resistance. By the way, we see that today. People who resist modern i. D. Whether it be in the muslim world or america, who resist change. There is einstein saying that the fundamentals youve always believed in theres a relativity. Now he was sent as they say of relativist beauty believed thomas of nature but the people who criticize say we want certainty and that was part of the antisemantic backlash against what was called jewish science. Host where do you write . Guest i ride at home usually at my ride at night. I am somebody who from 9 00 p. M. Until 1 00 or 2 00 a. M. When the phone is not going to ring or the iphone will not do a lot for things arent going to pop up or whatever, i can be in my home Office Writing hard and writing alone. I am not one of this person who tries to be an iron person and gets no sleep. One of the choice about being at the Aspen Institute is i can convince people that know great ideas have been before 9 00 a. M. And we shouldnt get into early. There was a job at cnn were ahead to be at 630 clock or 7 00. I like to write at night and sleep in until 8 00 or 9 00 when i can. Host do you write on an apple product . Guest i use dropbox. When im writing, i put it in the cloud. You could use amazon ibm or microsoft has a great Cloud Service now, but ive always used dropbox. I can be on the train going to new york on my ipad. I get to my office in which we use Dell Computers that are networked in the office. On my iphone i can pull it up. On any device i want to. So i am not as wedded to hardware and one of the great we have now is having class services. For if we took a break here and i want to pull up something im writing, i can just pull it up out of either dropbox or whatever Cloud Service i use. Host do you worry about security in that way . The security of the material. Guest no. I worry about security. Weve got it at the asp institute and part of me said we want people to read our reports. If they are spending their time translating all of our reports come it will be good for them then it will be good for us. I think the things you have to worry about our privacy and security. But somebody reading the first draft of one of our books doesnt keep me up at night. Host dennis in chicago heights, illinois. Hello, dennis. Caller hello. I want to thank cspan for this program today. I especially want to thank the author because i read all of his books and ive enjoyed all of them. Everything from the beginning wisemen up until his last book. The question i want to ask is on the kissinger book. That is what the release of the white house staff and the Nixon Administration and the like i think Dennis Brinkley was part of it. Has he changed his ideals to Mike Kissinger was a child at least in looking at the page. He is a lot worse than what hes portrayed in your book on kissinger. Guest yeah, i think were always getting more material. I listen to a lot of things before i wrote that book. There were many many of them available. Ive watched the new ones as theyve come out. There is no fundamental holy cow, who is totally different than we thought. It tapes really are revealing because they show private conversations where kissinger didnt know he was being taped. And so you see him sometimes cater to the darker side of Richard Nixons personality. To wrinkly did a great job adding some of those tapes and im glad theyre coming out. I have a friend as in thomas who we talked about, who did the wisemen with me his writing a biography of mixing based on those new tapes. I mean, those tapes are weird that historians cannot we used to have letters we used to have diaries. We used to taped conversations and meetings. That is a treasure trove for historians but i dont think theres anything that has come out since my book that fundamentally changes the book. Host chapter 32 january 1977, for the first time in eight years, Henry Kissinger arrived in new york city without the luxury of being borne by one of the air force chance of the president ial fleet. It was the week after jimmy carters inauguration and the cherished perks of power were starting to slip away. But unlike any other previous secretary of state, indeed unlike even any past president , kissinger would be able by dint of his dedicated efforts and largerthanlife personality to personality to retrieve the trappings of granger long after he had left office. Guest so we are here in washington. Yesterday, kissinger spoke at a lunch at csis one of the greatest think tanks. How it involves ukraine in particular russia. That was still as brilliant as any analysis youd want to see. Likewise, he was in front of john mccains Armed Services committee giving testimony. U. S. Last night. Henry kissinger just his ideas his thoughts and rival. His intellectual rigor retains the trappings of power and thats 1977. Lets do the math. Its been 38 years since he was last in government. Most people were born probably until he was last in government. And yet he is still somebody, who as much as you may want to be appalled at the code pink saying, it does show how he is still a dominant part of our thinking and of our debate over how idealistic worse is how realistic our Foreign Policy should be. So i definitely respect that. As i said, i depict a book of understanding. I think read world order. Henry kissinger wrote a book many years ago starting with richelieu and met vick and how world order happened how the treaty of her side how the west alien system of nationstates cons and even now many years later, he is still able to apply the rigorous intellectual framework in this world. Host do the clintons hold that the clintons sold their fame or . Guest certainly. They are running for president. Bill clinton has that. When he comes to the Aspen Institute we have, as i say people of both parties. But even the republicans in our audience asked even when bill clinton is there doing his tour of the world than just answering questions and remembering everybody and having read wonky policy papers on how urban revival happens in older cities and how the Creative Class moves in or how micropayments help women in indiana. He understands and knows more than anybody else and is absolutely hypnotizing when hes giving a dissertation. So he has that definitely. Host latecomer stand to retail california. Thanks for holding on. Uri with Walter Isaacson. Caller hello mr. Isaacson. Im 15 years old. Before i ask a question, i would like to say im in favor of the da vinci book of wealth. It seems that a lot of people my age dont get into biographies that much. I would like to ask you because the steve jobs book was my Favorite Book of all time. Id like to ask how your writing sets you apart from others because you are seems to be the only one i can connect to in that genre. Guest first of all you want to give steve jobs credit. If you like about this because steve jobs is a truly interesting person and was able to be you know revealing and dealing with the biographer. So i doubt i deserve the credit for the fact the steve jobs biography is very interesting to you. There is a larger issue which i think historians especially historic biographers come you sometimes write about the great forces of history. The very beginning of my kissinger book, but the epigram is something that he wrote on one of the Shuttle Missions back and forth to the middle east. He said something when i was rather harbored, used to think history was made by great courses but now that id get up close i see the difference individuals make. So we biographers believe in the role of an individual to bend the forces of history a little bit. We also have to understand because this is why i wrote the innovators, that sometimes we biographers distort history. Picnic it seem like it is just one person sitting in the garage and having a lightbulb moment and innovation happens, when in fact it is great innovators and thinkers, great individuals who know how to collaborate in forms teams. So that is what i tried to do in my latest book. But what sets me apart maybe from other academic historians is maybe if you just tell the story but here is the beginning and here is the person. Here is how he grew up in you listen to that person, Read Everything that person did and you can say that you can tell the history of our time to people and to me that is the best way to appreciate the creativity that goes into making history. Host as a professor i tend to think of history is run by impersonal forces. But when you see it in practice, you see the different personalities make. Henry kissinger 1974 after his first middle east saddle. Guest between gola malar anwar sadat but great leaders which we dont have now. You are not dealing with the golden aa or or Shimon Peres Orin and marjah. Anwar sadat. By the way that is the quote i was thinking of. Host Walter Isaacson, you havent written about anyone who has been elected to office. Guest wow i never thought of that. Franklin does get in the Colonial Assembly of pennsylvania. Your point is correct. I hadnt really thought about that. I do think that it is important and great to get in Electoral Office that has so many impediments to it. It is something i never did and shouldve done. If i could rewind the tape put yourself out there appeared run for office. Run for city council. And those people do get to make a difference. Public service is a very noble calling. Those of us in the press can sometimes make it difficult sometimes make it increasingly difficult to put yourself out there and be in Public Service in the run for office. And so maybe after da vinci and after leonardo and after Louis Armstrong. Host if you were to write about american president , is there one that pops in mind . Guest Theodore Roosevelt and i of course loved the bully pulpit as someone who is totally fascinating to me because he rises above party. Hes both a republican and a bull moose party, that he is somebody who wonders and the importance of the bully pulpit, of traveling across this country and saying he wanted a square deal. You know, it is almost lake a time of prosperity, a time of great technological change. People moving from the farm to industrial. Great technology exacerbating the divide between rich and poor. Make it harder for the middle class for the middle class. So they comes up with a square deal and unlike some of our leaders today, he says im going to do it and im just been a go for 90 days on a train and talk in every single talk about the malefactors of great wealth. The bankers who was friends at jpmorgan nobody called the malefactors of great while to say we have to have a square deal. So i love Teddy Roosevelt and never surpassed was good when i know. Host william is calling in from Hot Springs National park in arkansas i believe. Hi william. Call code minus my comment and a question perhaps. Many of the things ive been appreciated today have argued that answered and discussed. I would like to think cspan for the wonderful presentation that is made available to all of us and then i would like to express my deepest appreciation to mr. Isaacson for presenting to us to determine up the trail of some of the less familiar maybe the forgotten characteristics of so many of our great people. One other comment i would like to make as i have a very deep affinity for ben franklin. I had the great good fortune as they used to work in a small country printshop that printed the Community Weekly newspaper and old ben would have been right at home. I did it on the washington hen press. I became the operator of the press later. Host guest you probably see the great connection to someone like that who believes in the spread of information, who creates a postal system so ideas can move about like the internet. And so i really do admire that part of Benjamin Franklin, dead like me and you worked at a newspaper, book printing, love the free flow of information and ideas. Host and from trent trees ben franklin book and 21st century a successful networker with an inventive curiosity he wouldve felt right at home in the information revolution and his unabashed striving to be part of an upwardly mobile the made him and david brooks phrase, our founding yuppie. As to what one point was there some resistance to franklin . He was entrepreneurial. He was upwardly mobile. He was born of a foreign workingclass, candle maker becomes somebody who really want to succeed. So i think there was that enthusiastic yuckiness that i find appealing, but also what people say a little too ambitious little to brass. Host kristin spokane. Caller hi, i am a big fan mr. Isaacson. Thank you for taking my call. If the powers came to you and said here is the key and i open up all of it to you. Who would you ask to talk to be the most influential person in the person at the very bottom of the list. Host chris, who would you talk to . Who would be at the top of your list . Caller i like da vinci. At the bottom of the list i would like to talk to hitler. Host thank you man. Guest i would love to talk to Leonardo Da Vinci about one thing that is still a mystery to me is that he was a total genius. There is so much that he didnt complete. At t didnt complete, design for engineering that were never done. Is it because he has a passion for perfection . Is it because he didnt focus and try to do so much arisen because once he had broken the code on some team, he didnt deal he needed to put the finishing touches on a quiet that is what i am working on as i read his notebooks trying to get that question. Likewise if i talk to Louis Armstrong, who would be okay i know everything about you. Everything you did every day, but i dont know whether youre happy. I dont know what you felt about white people or whatever. I had the wonderful fortune to be able to do that with steve jobs. Every now and then i would do a person who is alive like a kissinger or steve jobs. Every now and then i will do a franklin or an einstein. When you get to talk to somebody, you say i know everything about you but this is still a mystery. At least in the case said steve jobs, page after page of my book is him trying to explain those things. Host new orleans finally get some love. Duane bohne for tweet in. We armstrong would be a great companion to Terry Teachout. Guest Terry Teachout does a very good book on armstrong. But i dont know much of teachout, but i think that has everything about Louis Armstrong in it. I still find this a mystery. What was the cause of the smile and the happiness . So to me i also would like to wrestle with that whole question of new orleans and the diversity in the mix of people. I would say that tolerance, but also the intolerance. I mean he is arrested on new years day so its not exactly ferguson, but what is happening with kids on the street back then and now. What is happening when story though opens and the great sense of tolerance, but also a tolerance for sin. You know his mother is probably turned tricks shall we say in parts of new orleans. So while it that gives you a sense of what is going or his mind and i would like to try to deal with that. To me new orleans is such a fascinating place. Obviously, it is fascinating in a complex way. To me it is a beautiful way. It is a city of math. As we speak today the carnival season is beginning. The first parades are rolling. Louis armstrong watched the zulu parade when his father, who didnt really raise them, he really didnt know his father that well. In whiteface and a mouse signifying in a strange way playing all those symbols of worries in say the early 1900 throughout new orleans is a city of mask. You mask for mardi gras. You wear your mask. Louis armstrong himself and always wore a mask. I think that smile was part of a mask. Now, what shakespeare teaches us especially growing up in henry the fourth is we be calm but mask we wear and not too is an interesting topic to explore. Host all right. We have four minute left. Ive been waiting for a caller to bring this out. Two questions. Did Albert Einstein fail math . In a few years ago, a book came out, einsteins bright. Guest what happens when einstein died without much authority from the family, he take his brain. Like hey you dont want to lose this thing. Takes his brain puts it in a jar of fermata hide and keeps einsteins brain. Over the years he would parcel of pieces of einstein ring against people would say i want to figure out, why was he so smart quiet there is a larger issue here which is really interesting. You can look at a beautifully old and this or that was different, but are we just machines . You can find in a size a little part of his brain, the explanation for einsteins genius. I dont ink so. I think we are not machines. We are humans. As much as they carve up the brain, as much as they try to find the secret. I said early on, you have to look for explanations of things but that doesnt mean under microscopes you can find genius by looking at the cells of the brain. And no he never failed math. In fact he was really good at math almost as good as he needed to be when he was finally doing general relativity. He laments the fact that is not as a little bit better because the calculus are starting to sound. He gets some good friends to help. He did fine and not. But it is a good mix to have because i saucon says who did the academy, he is doing a thing called you can learn anything. I urge our viewers. You can learn anything. You can learn math. You can learn relativity. Go to cannes academy. One of the video of the videos about inspiring people that you can learn anything since learn anything if theres einstein and the baby in about the same there was a time even einstein didnt know how to add numbers. You can learn anything. Host where is the majority of Albert Einsteins brain right now for guest i think most of it is now at him. But it was sort of parceled out. Host was not a fun chapter to write . At semiamused. Guest it was semiamusing. But it was a really amusing book about it. It was fun to write, but partly because they got to the larger issue. Can we just look mechanically and figure out why he was a genius . Now, you need the whole book, not just a microscope on his brain to say what made einstein into einstein. Host david england shot, pennsylvania. David you are the last word today. Caller thank you for taking my call. I read quite a few of your books, mr. Isaacson. The last two books i read was professor todd coons, the teacher of the mind and your the innovators. I read them because i saw you in 10 talking about them on booktv. Its such a wonderful format to have. I read a lot. I read all nonfiction. I am currently reading the doubles pay about buford at gettysburg. One of my questions is do you think sometimes historians and people that read your works dont understand and dont bother to look at that time that the person you are writing lives in or lived in and therefore they are making assumptions about that person based on our point of view of today . Guest yeah, that historicism or that historic fallacy has many names to it and which you impose the standards or ideas that today on a person. I think it is really important for readers and historians to wrestle with that. An obvious example is when youre doing slavery and youre trying to judge Thomas Jefferson or ben franklin or whatever. To me you have to rise above and be ahead of some of the moral sentiments of your time to be a great person which is why i think i can judge jefferson more harshly than others would because he didnt do that. Or even churchill did not get on the right side of history. But that is me imposing a later judgment on that. You have to be aware of it. The last chapter of my Benjamin Franklin book was the most fun to write because its however new generation discovers Benjamin Franklin and new and seasoned differently. And in an age of great economic struggle he is revered as a selfmade person. In a romantic period like the 1820s and 1830s people look down on and because he is not romantic and material enough. So when Benjamin Franklin, we see a reflection of our own time. We have to be aware that we as is judging him in the context of his time, but judging him in the larger context of history. Host so, does frank and deserve the accolade accorded by his great contemporary david hume of americas first philosopher, Walter Isaacson writes. This theology was an important achievement of the mint and franklin was an avatar in america. In addition by relating the rally to everyday human consequences, franklin laid the foundation for the most influential of americas homegrown philosophies, pragmatism. That is from Walter Isaacsons and American Life Benjamin Franklin an American Life. The first book came out in 1986 coauthor with six friends in the world they made. Kissinger a biography of 1992. Benjamin franklin the note three. Einstein 2007 steve jobs which is going to be made into a movie 2011. And the innovators a group of hackers geniuses and geeks created the digital revolution. You have been watching booktv on cspan2