>> John Haskell: I'm John Haskell and I'm the director of the Kluge Center here at the Library. The Center's mission is to connect thought and action, bridging the gap between scholarship on the one hand and the policymaking community and the interested public on the other. We do this at the Kluge Center by bringing leading thinkers in the humanities and social sciences to the Library for periods in residence to do research in the Library Collections. And by showcasing the work of those scholars and other prominent writers and thought leaders in public events. We're especially proud to sponsor today's event featuring Walter Isaacson, which is part of a year-long initiative here at the library inviting visitors to explore America's change-makers. Next week, the Kluge Center hosts a discussion on leadership in a time of political conflict featuring David Axelrod, Carl Rove and Ann Compton. In the fall, in conjunction with the Shall Not Be Denied Exhibit on women's suffrage, the Center will host an event on 100 Years of Women Voting. As well as events on the dynamics of the presidential primary, complicity and accountability in the Great Recession as well as Leadership Lessons from Lincoln and Grant featuring Ron White. Let me introduce our panelists today. The Library is honored to have Walter Isaacson for two straight days. He's with us as a university professor at Tulane, and he's a graduate of Harvard College and a Rhodes Scholar. He was national editor of Time Magazine after being its new media editor as early as the 1990's, and he was their editor beginning in 1996. He became chairman and CEO of CNN in 2001 and then president and CEO of the Aspen Institute in 2003. As you know, he's author of biographies of Leonardo da Vinci, Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, Henry Kissinger and others. Colleen Shogan will be conducting the interview today. She's assistant deputy librarian for collections and services here. And she's the moderator of the Aspen Institute's Socrates Program for Emerging Governance Leaders. Let me turn it over to Colleen. Thanks. >> Walter Isaacson: Thank you. Thank you. And by the way, we should -- there's nothing worse than an empty front row, but that all says reserved. At the Aspen Institute we had a rule which is you can come sit in the front row once it's started. So it's not like a Baptist church where you have to get there early to get a good seat near the back. [ Laughter ] >> Colleen Shogan: Thank you, John. Welcome to the Library of Congress. We're honored to have Walter Isaacson here today. After our brief conversation, there will be time for questions before the book signing. So keep all your questions in mind. We'll be coming around with a microphone. But today we're going to -- we can focus on a lot of different topics. But today we're going to focus on innovation. And I want to start out with a very general question to you. What is innovation? And as a historian, why have you been so focused in writing on it? >> Walter Isaacson: Well, as a journalist and historian, I learned that there are a lot of smart people in this world. And after a while, you realize smart people are a dime a dozen. They don't generally amount to much. What matters is if people can be innovative. And I guess the simplest description is Steve Jobs' phrase, "Think different." Which is somebody can see patterns across different disciplines and make a leap of creativity where they're able to think about something in a different way. And so whether it was Ben Franklin, Steve Jobs, Einstein or Leonardo da Vinci, these were people who were not necessarily the smartest people in their circle. But they were the most innovative and creative. >> Colleen Shogan: Okay, great. Let's start with Leonardo which is your most recent book. Most people know Leonardo as the artist who pained the Mona Lisa. And you cover that extensively in your book. But the larger point you want to make about Leonardo is this intersection between art and science. >> Walter Isaacson: And when Steve Jobs ever launched a product like the iPod, iPhone, whatever, he had street signs that were an intersection, like you just said, into the arts and technology. If you stand at that intersection, you do it. When Leonardo reaches the sort of frightening age of 30 years old, he runs away from Florence because he's not been finishing his paintings. And he writes a job application to the Duke of Milan. And it's 11 paragraphs long and the first 10 paragraphs are, "I can do weapons of war. I can do engineering. I can divert the course of rivers. I can build great public buildings." Only in the 11th paragraph did he say, "I can also paint." So he thinks of himself as an engineer and artist. I was just -- you can see it out the window -- at the National Gallery all morning, doing a NOVA sort of science TV show on PBS in front of Ginevra da Benci which is the only Leonardo painting outside of Europe. And Ginevra da Benci is done as a very young Leonardo in his early 20's. And it's the exact same as the Mona Lisa in some ways. It's a cloth merchant's wife in three-quarters profile with a river coming down from the ancient mountains and the mysterious look. But if you use that as a bookend of Leonardo's life, Ginevra da Benci when he's young, the Mona Lisa which he has by his deathbed, he's still working on it -- you see what a lifetime spent doing optics and engineering and anatomy and science, how that makes a three-dimensional portrait and enriches it so much. >> Colleen Shogan: What do you think best exemplifies that intersection for Leonardo? Could you pick a work that best exemplifies it? >> Walter Isaacson: Yeah, Vitruvian Man, you know, the naked guy doing jumping jacks in the circle and the square. Because Leonardo does that right after he gets to Milan for the Duke. And so he's supposed to be helping design churches. They want to build a lantern tower on the Milan Cathedral, which Leonardo hates because it's a gothic monstrosity. So he's trying to create what he says is a perfect church which is a circle in a square. Leonardo at that point has met the mathematician Luca Pacioli at the Court of Milan, who is helping try to figure out Euclid's ancient problem of how do you circle the square. Meaning, how do you make a circle the exact same area as a square using only a ruler and protractor, which is hard. Because pi is an irrational number. So he's doing the math. He's doing anatomy. He's dissecting the human body. He's designing churches. And they get to Pavia where they decide they're going to do it, and then the library at the castle in Pavia is a copy of Vitruvius's book of architecture. As you know, the Renaissance is called the Renaissance because it's basically about the rebirth of classical wisdom, of Pagia rediscovering Lucretia or others. So they rediscover Vitruvius's book of architecture. He says that a church should have the proportions of a human. Leonardo's an obsessive. He does 430 measurements of chin to nose, of his apprentices and you know, standing and moving, the knees to the genitals, to the navel, to the chest. All the proportions right. And he does this with a few friends. There's like three or four drawings where they're trying to illustrate Vitruvian Man. But then Leonardo does it. And it's a work of unbelievably great anatomy. You know, everything is right. It's also an unnecessarily beautiful piece of art. I mean, the cross-hatchings, the shadings. It's also a great work of, you know, science. It's a work of mathematics, because Vitruvius said that the navel should be in the center of the earth, but that the genitals are the center of creation. So what Leonardo does is -- if you go to the Accademia in Venice and look at it, you see the protractor thing right in the navel and does that circle with the navel. But the genitals, you know, the center of the square. So the circle has to go up higher than the square in Vitruvian Man. Sorry I'm going on about this. >> Colleen Shogan: No. >> Walter Isaacson: But when he does it, you have a circle that's the same area as a square. To him, that's spiritual. That somehow or another us fitting into the cosmos and creation gives you an approximation of squaring the circle. And then finally it's a self-portrait. That's him with those beautiful curly locks. And he's standing there naked saying, "How do I fit into creation? How do I fit into the cosmos as I stand here?" Because it's the end of the period where the religion gave you the exact answers of how you fit in. And there's Leonardo wrestling with it. >> Colleen Shogan: In addition to the intersection of arts and sciences, another big theme in your book about Leonardo is really your focus on his almost insatiable curiosity. >> Walter Isaacson: Unbelievable. >> Colleen Shogan: Can you tell us a couple examples for those who maybe haven't read the book that illustrate the depth and breadth of his curiosity? >> Walter Isaacson: The book is based -- the foundation of my book comes from his notebooks. He leaves us about 7,200 pages. They're awesome. And in the margins, when he's doing Vitruvian Man, which is from the notebook on the fetus in the womb and he's doing birds in flight and flying machines and helicopters, but he's always writing the questions and observations he makes. Like he observes somebody doing a gesture and he's going to use it for the Last Supper. But the questions are simple ones. Like, "Why is the sky blue?" I'm walking in the National Gallery so I'm looking at this -- you don't pause and think, but Leonardo did. And my favorite of all is like a list of nine things he wants to know that day. It's like, describe the tongue of the woodpecker. And who wakes up one morning and needs to know what -- I mean, it's not going to help him paint a bird or make a flying machine. I mean, what do you do? Get a woodpecker and open its mouth? But that's Leonardo. Describe the tongue of the woodpecker. >> Colleen Shogan: At the end of your book you have a number of lessons that we can all learn from Leonardo, even if we're not artists or scientists. >> Walter Isaacson: Yeah. >> Colleen Shogan: Can you share a few of those with us? And can you also answer the common criticism about Leonardo which is that he did not finish many of his masterpieces? >> Walter Isaacson: Yeah, one of the lessons I learn is procrastinate and don't finish. Everybody loves that lesson too. I procrastinate, they say. I'm like Leonardo. Yeah. But Leonardo loved the conception of a problem more than the execution, which is a problem. Because conception without execution is hallucination. And a lot of times he was not finishing things. But the main things that you should learn is to be curious, always curious, relentlessly curious. He's looking at birds. I was walking here looking at the birds. He was wondering which birds move their wings up faster or down faster when they fly. This is a type of observation and curiosity we can do each day, especially the way water ripples. That was a total fascination. When you pour the water -- I was just watching -- it swirls like that. We don't stop and notice. Leonardo may have 500 pages in a notebook that has the swirls and water and does the math to do it with the curls of hair like in the Mona Lisa or Ginevra da Benci. And so I guess the best lesson is pause, look at the birds that fly and the water that swirls. >> Colleen Shogan: Let's go back to a book you wrote about 15 years ago on Ben Franklin. And Ben Franklin is clearly also an innovator. He might be a little bit of a different type of innovator than Leonardo. How does Franklin combine pragmatism with innovation? Those two things don't necessarily always go together. >> Walter Isaacson: Yeah. First of all he's very much like Leonardo which is why I sort of end up with Leonardo. Because those are the two people in history who actually truly endeavored to know everything you could possibly know about every subject that was knowable. I mean, there's been Franklin trying to figure out leaves and botany and anatomy and the Gulf Stream and sea animals and John Locke and the balances of power in nature and the electricity experiments. Which we all think of him as a doddering due flying a kite in the rain, but these are really important electricity experiments. He figures out the single fluid theory of electricity. But he is in some ways like Leonardo but unlike Einstein, non-theoretical. As you say, he's very practical and pragmatic. For example, the electricity experiments. It's done over the course of three or four years. They have to do them in the summer when they can make static electricity. So in Philadelphia they're doing them. They make things like a battery. He invents that word. They, you know, figure out lightning is electricity, all these things. But he says, "What use is a theory if it has no practical use?" And he sort of denigrates Newton a bit. He says, "You know, we don't need the whole theory of gravity to know that if we let go of a piece of crockery it will fall to the floor and break." And he gets shocked a few times and he says, "The only use of electricity I've figured is that it makes a vain person rather humble because it can knock you out." I see Mark Pluck and my homebody from New Orleans here. At the end of the last season of experiments they try to do something practical, so they use the battery they make, Franklin does, to electrify a turkey, to kill it for the end of season feast. And he says, "It was uncommonly tender." So we like to think of Franklin as the inventor of the first fried turkey. >> Colleen Shogan: Right. Right. Now Franklin makes these innovations in a number of scientific fields, as you said. >> Walter Isaacson: Yeah. >> Colleen Shogan: We all know about the electricity, but there's also demography. There's oceanography, meteorology. How does he possibly do this without a formal scientific education? >> Walter Isaacson: Yeah, he and Leonardo are alike in that as well, is that neither went to college. Franklin was the tenth son of a Puritan in Boston, and so he was going to be his tithe to the Lord and was going to go to Harvard to study for the ministry. This was a long time ago when Harvard trained ministers mainly. >> Colleen Shogan: Right. >> Walter Isaacson: But Franklin was kind of cheeky. At one point they're salting away the provisions for the winter and he says to his father, "How about if you say grace over them right now and get it done with once and for all for the entire year?" And so he's not sent to Harvard. >> Colleen Shogan: Yeah. >> Walter Isaacson: He become an apprentice and a runaway. But they're not stuffed with conventional wisdom. Leonardo never gets jammed into his head the scholastic theories of the Middle Ages. And Franklin doesn't get, you know, increased math or trying to teach him. So they both have a phrase called let the experiment be made. You see it in the bottom of the notebooks of Franklin when he is doing the comparison of electric sparks to lightning. You see it on many pages of Leonardo, "Discelplo de experimente," you know, a disciple of experience and experiments. So that's what really helps them I think think different. >> Colleen Shogan: In the second half of your book you focus on Franklin's innovation in a different area which is his diplomacy. This might be of interest to this audience in particular. And of course Franklin is abroad. He's in Paris when they're trying to negotiate the alliance with the French during the Revolution. And then negotiate the peace treaty with the British upon the end of the war. >> Walter Isaacson: Yeah, and to try to keep us from revolting against Britain he's our agent in Britain in the 1760's. >> Colleen Shogan: Right. He combines -- you argue that he combines realism with idealism. And this is a new form of diplomacy. Can you talk about that? Why was it so effective? >> Walter Isaacson: Yeah. When I did the biography of Henry Kissinger, I was struck by how deep of a realist he was. A balance of power type realist. And we don't have that much in this country. But then as I was doing the studies, I realized Franklin was our last -- and part of it comes from his science. I mean, he understands checks and balances, balances of power, Newtonian mechanics, electric flows, positive and negative. So he's able to do a balance of power diplomacy, especially when he goes to get France in on our side in the Revolution. He does a whole lot about why if they come in on our side, navigation rights -- but he also realizes, unlike most Americans at the time, that this wasn't just a British colonial war. This is part of a much larger, you know, 200 years of war in which the Bourbon Pack nations of France, England and Spain had been -- you know. So he's saying, "If you want to get the balance right, you've got to come in on our side in this Revolutionary War." But he is also an idealist, or he understands the power of idealism. The first thing he does when he gets to Posse, the part of Paris where he moves in 1776 after he helps write the Declaration, then he sails over to France to see if he can make it a reality, is he builds a printing press. And so it's printing copies of that Declaration and the Declaration of Human Rights from Virginia and all the inspiring documents. Because he knows that welling up in the French people is this notion of liberty, egalite, welling up a little bit too much in the end. But that he is not there just to appeal to the king, but to appeal to Voltaire and the philosophs that are there. So he does this great idealism so much so -- the French have read Rousseau. I mean, he's the big hero of that time. They've read him once too often. And Franklin gets it, that they think of America as the natural, you know, nature's person, et cetera. And Franklin when he gets carried through the streets of Paris when he first arrives wears a sort of frontier frock coat and a coonskin-lined cap. Franklin had never lived on the frontier. He's lived on Market Street in Philadelphia, you know, Milk Street in Boston and Craven Street in London. >> Colleen Shogan: Right. >> Walter Isaacson: He's not a frontiersman. But he's going to be Rousseau's natural man as he's carried through. And so he appeals to the idealism and the realism. >> Colleen Shogan: Right. Does that affect foreign policy in the future of the United States, that combination? Or do you see that -- >> Walter Isaacson: Yeah, I mean I think that is the essential combination of American foreign policy that's exceptional. Meaning there are many countries that are much better than we are at asserting their interests and doing balance of powers. There are very few nations that are as idealistic as we are. And that sometimes tips the balance improperly, I mean badly. I was just reading George Packer's great biography of Holbrook. And the idealism of all of these young foreign service officers when they go to Vietnam in the early 1960's -- I mean, people who are, you know, maybe on the far left, far right conspiracy think we were in Vietnam because we had some insidious stealing of oil or whatever. No. It's this weird sort of American idealism that we can make people free instead of communist or whatever, and not fully understand the struggle. So I think throughout American history we've had that idealism and realism, I will say in balance but sometimes out of balance. >> Colleen Shogan: Let's talk a little bit about Steve Jobs. And I love all of your books. I will admit to you that that's my favorite. >> Walter Isaacson: Yeah. >> Colleen Shogan: And the one that I keep coming back to. When I read the Leonardo book, it really struck me the similarities in particular between Jobs and Leonardo. Can you talk about some of them? >> Walter Isaacson: He felt the same way. [ Laughter ] Actually, in some truth, he said, "You've got to do Leonardo." Because as I said, when Steve introduced products, he always did that intersection you talked about of the sciences and the arts. >> Colleen Shogan: Right. >> Walter Isaacson: And you know, the difference between Steve Jobs and Bill Gates is Bill Gates was smarter in a way, more mental processing power. You know, just a super genius that way. But Steve had a more intuitive feel for beauty and the arts which is why Steve Jobs makes the iPod and you know, Bill Gates makes the Zune. I don't know if anybody even remembers what the Zune was, but it was a music player that Microsoft came out with that looked like it had been designed in Uzbekistan. [ Laughter ] So Steve does that intersection understanding that beauty matters. >> Colleen Shogan: The book is full of examples of Jobs innovating. I'd be curious to hear some of your favorite stories related to his innovations. >> Walter Isaacson: Yeah. I mean, when I first thought of doing him, I realized his approach transformed almost a dozen realms of endeavor. I mean, he's the first to make a personal computer you can take out of the box and plug it in and it can be you, as opposed to IBM making it. He's the first to steal from Xerox a graphical user interface. So you have little trash cans instead of, you know, some of us are old enough to remember the C prompt, with the C backslash, you know. So he transforms the computer industry. Then you know, the music industry, the telephone industry, the app world of, you know Uber and everything else. Retail stores, for that matter digital animation, movies. He's transforming all these things. Best example, or one example -- if you say best, I'll just pick one that's thinking about it. >> Colleen Shogan: Sure. >> Walter Isaacson: He does the iPod, totally innovative. Because none of us knew we needed 1,000 songs in our pocket. Then boom, the minute that iPod comes along, I don't know about you, but I needed an iPod with 1,000 songs in my pocket. And it transforms Apple, becomes the profit driver for Apple in 2001, whenever it is. And instead of resting on his laurels, everybody at Apple's like thrilled, he's worried. And he says, "You know, this is making too much money. What's going to kill us?" And then he says, "If the braindead people who make cell phones figure out they can put music on cellphones, that will kill us." So he decides secretly to start making the iPhone. And there are people in his company saying, "No, you're going to cannibalize the iPod. You're going to ruin the iPod sales if you do that." He said, "If we don't cannibalize ourselves, somebody will eat us for lunch." Innovation means the ability to break out of the silo that's successful and try something different. And I think if I had to pick one piece of innovation we can all relate to, it's like building -- it's like cannibalizing the iPod because you want to build the iPhone. And creating something that has probably changed our lives more than any device. I mean, I can't walk from the National Gallery here without seeing two-thirds of the people looking down at their phones, looking at the GPS, taking selfies of them in front of the capital, whatever it may be. >> Colleen Shogan: Right. >> Walter Isaacson: But two-thirds of the people between here and there are at the moment fiddling with an iPhone. >> Colleen Shogan: Absolutely. >> Walter Isaacson: Or calling an Uber or figuring out AirBnB. >> Colleen Shogan: Right. >> Walter Isaacson: I mean, this is a $2 billion economy that happened within six months of them creating an App Store. I mean, you wouldn't have Uber if you didn't have a cell phone that had GPS in it, that had you know, connectivity, that had an App Store. And so a whole new set of peer-to-peer economy happens because of the iPhone. >> Colleen Shogan: In the book you also talk about the darker side of Steve Jobs. And can you talk a little bit about that? What was the reality, distortion field? >> Walter Isaacson: Yeah. >> Colleen Shogan: And what happened to you if you got caught in it? >> Walter Isaacson: Yeah. I mean, Steve used to believe that he could distort reality. >> Colleen Shogan: Right. >> Walter Isaacson: And so he would say to Wozniak before they even do Apple, "You've got to" -- they were trying to code a game at Atari. "You've got to do it in 3D." And Woz would say, "No." He'd say, "Don't be" -- he went to NDN. He had this guru who taught him to stare without blinking. He'd say, "Don't be afraid. You can do it." Woz said he got so freaked out that he, you know, stayed up three nights in a row. And likewise, when they're doing the original Mac, it takes about 90 seconds to boot up which is, you know, worse than the Microsoft machine. So Steve says, "You've got to shave 10 seconds off it." And Larry Kenyon the engineer says, "Look, Steve, look at the code." Steve stares at him without blinking. And it goes on. I mean, this is, you know, the early 70's. But you go 30 years later and he wants a piece of glass for the iPod that he's doing, then the iPhone. And he doesn't like the glass. It scratches. So he talks to the head of Corning and the head of Corning says, "We invented a process called Gorilla Glass but we've never actually made it." Steve went through and said, "That's what I want. I need this much by September. We're going to deliver in October." And Wendell Weeks said, "No, no, I've told you. We've never done it before. We can't do it by" -- and I went and actually saw Wendell Weeks up in Corning, New York. He said, "It was amazing. The guy sat right in front of me and stared at me without blinking." And said, "Don't be afraid. You can do it." >> Colleen Shogan: Right. [Laughs] >> Walter Isaacson: And Wendell Weeks eventually called the plant manager in Lexington. They're making flat screen TV glass for Corning. And he says, "I want you to change over to Gorilla Glass." And the guy says, according to Weeks, "Okay, we'll do it in a month or so. We'll get it." He said, "No, I want you to do it Monday." And the plant manager says, "No, no, there's no way." And Wendell said, "I just kept saying to him, don't be afraid. You can do it." [ Laughter ] So that reality distortion field drives people crazy, but it drives them to do things they didn't know they're going to be able to do. So everybody in the book says, "Oh man, he drove me crazy. He was such a jerk." Actually in Silicon Valley they have a word that begins with A that's a synonym which is the word they all use. And then they say, "But you know, now that I think about it, he drove me to do things I didn't know I could do." >> Colleen Shogan: Everything that you've known in the time you spent with Steve Jobs and all the people who worked for him, would you have worked for Steve Jobs? >> Walter Isaacson: Oh, in heartbeat. Because he's the most transformative individual of our day and generation. I mean, you know, you wouldn't give that up for the world. >> Colleen Shogan: You talked about all the different industries that he transformed. He died unfortunately at the age of 56. What was the next sector that he was going to work on? >> Walter Isaacson: He was talking about television because what he does with the iPod say is not so much create just a music player. He creates an end-to-end integrated system that allows you for 99 cents to go to the iTunes store and get the content. As opposed to trying to do it for free on Napster. He realized if he made it easy enough, people would pay for the song. But then he also has the iTunes software that you use to help organize your playlists and all in the iPod. And then he has the iPod. The point I'm making is he integrated hardware, software, content. I think he would have done that with television. So television is the worst consumer product that exists today. I mean, I'll go into a hotel room, whatever, you know, and there's one or two remotes and there's absolutely no way to figure out where to get to. And you have to, if you want to watch Christiane Amanpour on PBS, you have absolutely no clue when it's on. And you, you know, don't even know how to get to a guide to figure it out. I mean, there's no reason television should be so braindead. And if Steve had tackled television, I'd be able to walk into my hotel room on demand -- so I wouldn't have to wait till 11:00 PM or 10:00 PM or whatever WBTA does it. And I'd be able to say, you know, "Hello, television. Put on Christiane Amanpour," and it would come on. But we don't have that now because the people who make TV are braindead. [ Laughter ] >> Colleen Shogan: So with the departure of Jony Ive from Apple, do you think they will be able to continue in the legacy of Jobs, this intersection between arts and humanities? >> Walter Isaacson: Well I think that Apple has been transformed rightly so from being a company that's almost beauty inventors, doing things like iPhones and iPads and you know, iPods and other things to being a major, at times the largest corporation by market capital, largest corporation. So I think it's a bit unfair to say, "Oh, they're not innovative and dancing around like that." Because they've got this huge corporation to run. How diplomatic was that? >> Colleen Shogan: Yeah, that's diplomatic. Because Jony Ive was of course his alter -- you know, in your book -- >> Walter Isaacson: Oh yes, spiritual soulmate, alter ego. >> Colleen Shogan: Right. >> Walter Isaacson: But they would just spend time together almost every day when Steve was at headquarters walking that design studio and just feeling everything, not just the new earbuds or the new phone, but the electrical, the jack, how you plugged it into the wall, the sound of the snap it made. And that was something you could truly indulge when you were creating this amazingly innovative company. You have to remember Steve got fired the first round at Apple because he was indulging this so much and you know, real artists sign their work. So they finally gave him a sign saying, "Real artists ship." Meaning you've got to get a product out the door. And so you know, that beauty that Steve and Sir Jony Ive did is just awesome. It's inspiring. It can bring tears to your eyes. It's also probably not -- can't just be the whole of what a corporation like Apple does. >> Colleen Shogan: Today we're here at the Library of Congress who plays an important role in the innovation, the protection, the preservation, hopefully the fostering of innovation for our collections. We're right across the street from the United States Congress who supports innovation through funding, also regulates innovation in some degrees by making laws. What would you say to this audience about what can we learn from da Vinci? What can we learn from Franklin and Jobs and Einstein and others to make sure that America stays at the top of its field in innovation? >> Walter Isaacson: Vannevar Bush coming out of World War II is asked that question by Roosevelt. Unfortunately he has to give the answer to Truman because Roosevelt dies right afterwards. And he writes Science, The Endless Frontier. It's about you have to invest in basic science in order to then get to the translational and practical technologies that he said basic science would be the seed corn from. And you can see it over and over again. They're investing in say how do electrons dance on semiconducting materials? And what is the surface state of materials in quantum theory? How does that -- you know, and they're doing that at all sorts of universities, Bell Labs. And then it ends up you get a transistor and then you get a microchip out of it. Likewise, with them trying to figure out packet-switch networks which had actually been thought of in England, but boom, they do it here. And you get the internet coming out of it. So this sort of process in which basic science gets funded, sometimes you know, part of it out of, you know, government funding. That then leads to products. That's what made us innovative in the 20th century. That's what we're endangering now since China easily spends more on basic research involving both biotech, cellular biology and artificial intelligence and machine learning. And I don't think if you don't crack the basic science you're going to be the country that cracks the practical application of it. >> Colleen Shogan: Who or what is at the top of the game right now in innovation? What are you watching personally that you would like to alert us to? >> Walter Isaacson: I think the most important, dangerous and promising innovation that's happening in this period of the past five years or so is the ability to create genetic engineering molecules, technology. CRISPR being the most famous example. Where you can take an enzyme, attach it to a guide RNA that knows where to go in a particular person's DNA and snip it and cut it. So that if you want, you can take a couple that has a mutation for Huntington's and fix it, or the mutation for sickle-cell anemia, Tay-Sachs and fix it. Or muscle mass is pretty easy. They've already done it in mice and pigs and all. If your kid is not going to be strong enough, you can add height and muscle mass to your child. You can make your child blond and blue eyes if you want. A Russian doctor has announced that he's doing it right now in the embryos, germ line. Which means it's not just for the person it's being done to, but all future generations. It means it's an inheritable genetic edit and doing it for congenital deafness. Probably most people in this room would say, "Well, that's okay. If somebody's going to have a deaf child, they have a right to edit that out." We will end up, if that worked, with a planet in which there are not deaf people. And the variety of this world will change for good or for bad. But also if you start enhancing cognitive intelligence and memory and learning skills and height, and since even in this world today -- I was talking to Feng Zhang who is one -- Jennifer Dowden at Berkeley and Feng Zhang are the two leaders. He's at MIT. Patent battle between them. But he was saying in this world most people don't have equal access to eyeglasses. They're not going to have equal access to genetic engineering. So we're going to do what Aldous Huxley wrote about in Brave New World. We're going to engineer a privileged class of the genetically enhanced and have a mass of people who are genetically unenhanced. This will codify, literally speaking, the inequalities of opportunity that are the bane of our society now. >> Colleen Shogan: So this is a good last question. Can you tell us about your next book and what you're working on? >> Walter Isaacson: Well, Zhang, Jennifer Dowden and others who are in the forefront of CRISPR and genetic engineering technology. I think it's useful -- I mean, most people here, if I go to the National Gallery, they'd be appalled if you didn't know the difference between Picasso and Maroe or something. But they would barely admit that they have no real clue of the difference between RNA and DNA or a gene and a chromosome. And I think being a Philistine and not understanding science is deeply harmful when it comes to helping figure out the policies we have to figure out. But also Leonardo would be appalled, so would Ben Franklin, because you're leading an unenriched life if you do not know how life works. Or if you don't know how your computer works, if you don't understand what a transistor -- you know, people wouldn't know the difference between a transistor and a resistor. I try to teach that in my class. How does a circuit work? How does an on/off switch do logic to help you get from here to there? And so I think the fact that we've become two societies where there are all these humanists and arts people saying, "Oh, we've got to teach art in the schools." Yeah, but before you give the lecture, you should learn a little bit about biology and technology. >> Colleen Shogan: That's great. We can now go to the audience if there are questions. Yes. >> Based upon your research of some of these very interesting people, I'm curious whether you think there's a curiosity gene. The reason I ask that is you commented that you observed [inaudible] three-quarters walking around with their iPhone. They don't carry it in their pocket. They have it in their hand. >> Walter Isaacson: Right. >> So I asked a millennial a question. They don't know the answer. And I asked them the same question the next day and [inaudible]. Tell me about curiosity. >> Walter Isaacson: I think -- you know, I'm not somebody who -- I went to go see James Watson who did the structure of DNA last week. And I was up at the CRISPR conference. There are a lot of people who are more genetic determinists than I am. I think there's a complex weave between environment and genetics. So I walked to Union Station yesterday or the day before when I came in. And I'm watching a nine- or ten-year-old kid, a boy, who is doing what all nine- or ten-year-olds do. He's saying, "Daddy, why does the sign keep changing." It was an electronic sign. "Daddy, how does the machine know when the trains are coming? Daddy, boom, boom, boom." And finally the father did what every father would do in that situation and finally said, "Shut up and quit asking so many stupid questions." [ Laughter ] So I think when we're nine or ten it's not genetic. We're in our wonder years. We wonder why that leaf is shiny on one side and not the other, or whatever. And we kind of get it beat out of us because it doesn't help you on the SAT's. It doesn't help you in life if you keep wondering why the sky is blue or something. Mark Plotkin is sitting here and he's an ethnobiologist mainly in Central America is where you do most of your research. And your work with shamans who hand down wisdom. I'm not going to put you too much on the spot in front of all the people. I would suspect you would say that curiosity is more of a social construct that we can either instill or knock out of us than it is a set of genes that make people more curious. >> Well, it's also a survival skill. >> Walter Isaacson: Yeah. [ Inaudible ] You've got to figure out which mushroom is which. [ Inaudible ] >> How do I get my kid better and how do I not die from eating the wrong thing? >> Walter Isaacson: Yeah. Now we have genes that we will look at. Even dopamine receptor genes that make you more thrill-seeking, let us say, or more addictive in your personality. I suspect we'll find genes that somehow correlate to almost all personality traits. Well, not one gene, but scores of genes that make you more adventurous, make you more risk-taking, whatever. But I suspect that that is a complex interplay with the environmental factors. And it's easy to keep ourselves to be as curious as we were in our wonder years. We don't have to worry about genetic engineering to do that. Are you in charge? Okay. >> Next week, the nation's going to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11. And for many of us, we can remember Kennedy's speech about going to the moon. >> Walter Isaacson: Right. >> And how that transformed and created sort of a national mission that really changed science and the importance of it. What would you like to see from a public policy perspective to relaunch the next generation of science and reaching beyond the stars? >> Walter Isaacson: Yeah. It's somewhat complex. Because what really launches science, when we were at Newman or whatever, wasn't Apollo 11 or the moon landing. It was Sputnik. And it was that ability to go outside -- I may get the year wrong, but approximately 1959 or so. And you're five or six years old and they're pointing to a light in the sky that's moving around. And suddenly we're in a race with an adversary. And so the competition helps people like me go into science or engineering to the extent I did. You know, if you talk to Jeff Bezos, he gets inspired by the moon launch, et cetera. I think science as something we should all be aspirational about has been lost. And part of it is the iPhone and all these things. When I was a kid, my father was an electrical engineer. My uncle, my cousin, my brother. So we had a workshop in the basement in which we would have soldering irons. We'd make circuits and you'd know how a circuit worked. At a certain point, mainly because of Steve Jobs, it suddenly becomes a sealed product. The Macintosh you can't even open up. Whereas the older computers you could figure out how they worked. So you lose that fingertip feel for how our technology works. And that happens approximately in the early 1970's. And I think for the past 50 years we've lost science as being part of the wonder years. In the 50's and 60's, the space program and Sputnik. But then when we got computers that we were no longer allowed to open up, it became part of a pattern where you didn't have to know science. >> Hi. You just touched on something that bugs a lot of people right now which is the right to repair. I just wondered if you have anything to say about that. >> Walter Isaacson: The right to repair meaning a genetic -- >> No, no, no, not CRISPR, no. >> Colleen Shogan: iPhone. >> Walter Isaacson: Oh, the right to repair meaning your iPhone. Meaning how mad am I that my iPhone battery since I don't upgrade as often as Apple would want, I'm now on the second time around to change batteries which takes three hours at the Apple store because you can't open it up and get your battery. You can't repair it. Steve Jobs, as you'll see in the book, his genius as well as, you know, was that he really was controlling, a control person. He wanted end-to-end control. He didn't want you to be able to use his hardware with somebody else's operating system or his Apple operating system with somebody else's crappy device, whatever. So he had end-to-end control of the hardware, software and the content. And he didn't want you to open it up. He even made special screws on the Macintosh that you can't use a Philips head screwdriver, because he wanted -- it was like the gardens in Kyoto he would go to that were not letting 1,000 flowers bloom but were carefully curated. This makes for spiritually beautiful, wonderful products that work perfectly end-to-end. But it also makes for products that you can't open up, you can't fix, you can't jack into, you can't -- even for a while he didn't want third parties to write apps for the iPhone App Store. So I do think that that's a problem which is not only do we get alienated from our technology, but we get forced to not have the hands-on imperative which used to be the mantra of the early computer geeks. Which is, "I've got to have hands on. I've got to be able to jack into it." >> So I'm a huge fan of what's referred to as the modern maker movement and the hands-on learning by doing approach to STEM/STEAM education. >> Walter Isaacson: Right. >> And I just wonder, you know, in this whole notion of trying to keep innovation alive, what you think the importance is of kind of hands-on approaches to teaching STEAM in schools and what we need to do to make that more broadly -- >> Walter Isaacson: Yeah. I think one of the great entrepreneurial and to some extent innovative things happening in our society is not only the makers movement but the local makers movement. So artisanal things, so that we're not all drinking Bud Light but there's -- every few blocks in Brooklyn has its own mini brewery or something. That's kind of cool. And I think the App Store on Apple allowed or for that matter eBay, Amazon allows people a chance to create on their own and find a market. To get slightly political, which I don't mean to do -- and this is not so much partisan, but it involves the Library of Congress's work and Congress's work -- is that works better when you have slightly more competition. As opposed to large corporations that if you're going to do something like create a new app for dating or new app for dog walking or a new shopping thing where you can make your own artisanal beer -- where the Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple don't have control as much as they do. Because I do think innovation comes from competition and real competition, where a dozen people are competing to do things. And I think our anti-trust and patent policies have reduced in the past 20 years the amount of competition among entrepreneurs and innovators to be able to do things without thinking, "Well, if I succeed, Google will just replicate it, or you know, put me out of business." So I would like to see more pro-competitive, pro-market practices so that small innovators can get traction. [ Inaudible ] >> How do you end up fostering this in kids? You know, we had Erector sets when I was a kid, right? >> Walter Isaacson: Yeah. >> Or make our own FM radios. And it seems like more could be done to make that technology which is so widely available. >> Walter Isaacson: Yeah. Right. There's a lot of -- there's less hands-on learning, partly because we can't build our own tools anymore. Meaning you might teach a kid to code but you're not going to teach him to make a circuit or her to make a robot. I mean, there's some of these things -- what's his name -- Dean Cayman does for First Robotics. But that's a pretty -- I mean that should be in every school in America but it's not. I'm not -- you know, you can get into arguments about testing and you know, math and English tests and all that. But I do believe you're right, that the hands-on imperative which was the mantra of the home brew computer clubs and people like that, we should get back to that phrase and understand the depth and power of that phrase, of the hands-on imperative. >> I wonder if you have a thought about the taking of personal information from genetic information to our identity information that's used by corporations and government, and how that is -- oh, from the standpoint of commercialization of products. >> Walter Isaacson: And privacy. Are you talking mainly about genetic, or are you talking about our web surfing and Facebook information type? >> I would argue that it's all part of a similar problem. >> Walter Isaacson: We have created in the information technology space a business model that's horrible, which is that the main source of revenue is advertisers. So what you do if you're a website or anything else or Google is you garner eyeballs and then the personal information about them to make sure you can sell it to advertisers. And that's a problem that's destroying the media business. I don't see that problem, and I've been deeply involved in trying to think it through, but I may not know it all, in medical data and genetic data. I mean, I've worked like at the Boro. Derek Landers working on it, and it's almost doing the opposite. It's a program called Count Me In. Because if you get your gene sequence and if you have cancer and if you are being treated, you know, for cancer, there's no database that easily says, "Let's figure out how this painkiller works on some of this cancer." Because HIPAA and all the privacy laws are pretty strict. I think people should have the right to invoke absolute privacy on their genetic and health data. But I think people should also have the right which is very difficult to do -- just like you have the right to be an organ donor -- to say, "Count me in." Just take my data and use it for science. And that's very difficult these days. >> Colleen Shogan: Question over here, right here. And then we'll go. >> Hi. In your opinion, is 5G like iPhone, iPod change-maker? >> Walter Isaacson: Yeah, 5G will be somewhat of a change-maker here. But it's mainly just a faster version of what we already have. It's not going to be like an iPhone which changes everything because it has everything from, you know, GPS to voice to music to maps to all these things. 5G is a complicated issue in this country because we are probably going to lose to China the ability to set the standards of 5G. For many complex reasons, and this is the whole Huawei dispute, but China's ahead of us. They've done more basic science. And also -- and I don't want to get too technical, but you can read a Defense Innovation Board report that just came out. The lower bandwidths which are more important and are more powerful for using 5G technology are not available in the United States because the Defense Department has a lock on them. So it has to be a higher bandwidth, which makes the 5G GPS standards slightly different here and less efficient. Which means Europe and Africa and other places in the world will probably go with the Chinese standards which probably is not good for American innovation. >> Hello. Obviously in the course of your research for your various biographies you have spent considerable time in archives all over the world getting intimately acquainted with your subjects. What is the most exciting personal discovery you've made in the course of your archive research? >> Walter Isaacson: And of course I have to give a shout-out to the Library of Congress. >> Colleen Shogan: Yes. >> Walter Isaacson: Which has absolutely wonderful archives. And I will answer that, but let me first say something which is a slightly confusing thing which -- I don't know, other people could speak to better. Which is when I was first doing Ben Franklin, all of his letters are at the Sterling Library of Yale. I'd take the train and I'd go box by box, touching with white gloves on the actual letter he's writing to his sister about this. And at a certain point, the Packard Foundation digitizes it all so I don't have to go out there. I just have a CD-ROM. Likewise with Einstein's papers. I used to go to Hebrew University at Cal-Tech, look at the papers. But then the Einstein, they caught up and it's all digital. So there's a question of what is the value to actually being in the proximity or being with the real document in an archive versus seeing it in really high resolution in ways that you can look at like Leonardo's notebooks? If you get Bill Gates' -- I've seen his codec. I've seen it where he displays it at his house. But it's a whole lot easier with this incredible high resolution where you can see each movement of Leonardo's hand better. And so there is something inspiring though about actually being in the presence of the real thing. You know, I discovered -- I mean, a lot of things with Leonardo's notebooks. Because it's one of the few collections of material that hasn't been brought together, digitized. You can't go online and look at all 7,200 pages. But just going to the Accademia in Venice and seeing Vitruvian Man and seeing the point of the protractor where Leonardo puts it right there in the navel and then, you know, you realize how he's drawing it and doing the square. And you see the incisions of the lines. It's not only inspiring but you get a good feel that, "Oh, he was squaring the circle. He was designing a church and he was drawing himself in the universe, the cosmos." And I don't think people have appreciated Vitruvian Man that much. Very rarely on display because you know, if it hits sunlight, it could fade. So they never bring it out of this fourth-floor closet they have at the Accademia. I was able to talk them into bringing it out. If you look at the hardback of my book -- I'm not sure it's on the paperback -- the author's photo is me leaning over Vitruvian Man, just staring right at it. And I had walked up four flights of stairs in July in Venice to get there. And I'm thinking, "If I drop a piece of sweat onto this drawing, you know, for millennia, for centuries people will say, why did Leonardo" -- no that was some jerk who -- yeah. So I wonder -- I teach a course on the digital revolution at Tulane and I've had a couple of my students -- I've assigned them the project of what happens to archives in the digital age? >> Colleen Shogan: Okay, we have time for right here and the two more questions. >> You know, I am so grateful about the internet because you can go traveling and see lots of things without going anywhere, just sit in a chair. But the thing is, if you don't have Wi-Fi or electricity is out, it's gone. You know. But the thing is too, what I have noticed is whatever you can see on the internet, it's nothing in comparison to when you are there. >> Walter Isaacson: Right. And that is the main challenge we have with the internet, which is it can help spur curiosity or it can quench curiosity. When I go see the Mona Lisa at the Louvre, the room is jammed. 90% of the people in the room are not looking at the Mona Lisa. They're doing selfies with their iPhones at the Mona Lisa. >> Colleen Shogan: Right. >> Walter Isaacson: So one worries about technology as the gentleman here said tamping down our curiosity rather than sparking it. And yes, we have one more back there. >> Colleen Shogan: Yeah, right over here. >> Walter Isaacson: Yes. >> There's another thing that I want to mention. I watched the solar eclipse you know in Chile online. But I went to South Carolina and experienced it. What a world of difference. >> Walter Isaacson: Right. And that's being like Leonardo. Yeah. And I drove with Betsy who Mark knows to Snake River, Idaho so I could see the eclipse. Because I said Leonardo would want us to do that. [ Laughter ] >> Colleen Shogan: Our last question. >> So you talked a little bit about -- >> Walter Isaacson: Stand up if you would. Yeah. Yeah, sorry. >> You talked a little bit about the future of scientific development such as with artificial intelligence and gene editing. >> Walter Isaacson: Yeah. >> And I was wondering if you might comment on moral developments that might be able to balance out the power and increased control we have over influencing our environment with the technology. >> Walter Isaacson: Right. Well, that's what I'm trying to do this next book about. But it's true of all of science. Whether it's Einstein's basic science about E equaling MC squared eventually leading to the creation of an atom bomb, to understanding of the RNA, how active of a molecule it is leading to a gene editing tool. We have throughout human history generally had our moral processing power move lockstep with our scientific advances. We're usually pretty good. Sometimes we screw it up royally. Maybe dropping the atom bomb. But we catch up with that and we pretty much stop the use of nuclear weapons in the past 70 years or so. The question about genetic editing technology is, will this be the first time our science totally outstrips not only our ability to process it morally but our ability to form a social consensus to contain it morally? To say, "Here's what we will allow. Fixing of Huntington's, fixing of you know, diseases. Here's what we won't allow which is rich people to travel with genetic tourism to make sure their kids are six inches taller and 20 IQ points higher." I mean, that's way down the road, but that's -- and I think the problem of doing the moral processing of science is this divide I talked about that begins in the 1970's. But it also begins in the teens with Einstein which makes science so frightening to normal people that C. P. Snow writes about, The Two Cultures. Which is a great essay. You should read it. Which is basically about how we have a science culture and then we have people who are humanists. But people who do both, Ben Franklin, Leonardo, no longer exist. I feel it's essential to the progress of civilization that people who are great humanists also fully love science and that people who truly are great scientists understand the humanities. Not just because you'll create the iPod rather than the Zune, but because when we get to certain stages, people may across the street at least in the capital say, "Oh, here's what we're going to do on genetic engineering." But last night when Maria and I were at dinner, I was talking to Bill Cassidy. He's a doctor. He's my senator from Louisiana. But there was another Congressman I won't even name who had no clue what RNA is. You know, he said, "I thought it was DNA." No, no, no, they're two -- you know, if you have no clue about science, you're not going to be part of the conversation about what do we do with science. And we're losing that. We're losing that with social networks, with social media, with our iPhones, with the internet, and now with biology. So the theme of all my books, from Ben Franklin to Einstein to Steve Jobs to Leonardo and now my next book is there are people who get both. They love both science and the humanities. And we will need that more than ever in the next generation. >> Colleen Shogan: Mr. Isaacson will be signing books. >> Walter Isaacson: Come on up afterwards and I'll be happy to. >> Colleen Shogan: And we are selling several of your books right adjacent to us. But please join me in thanking Walter for joining us today. Thank you. >> Walter Isaacson: Thank you. [ Applause ]