Transcripts For KQEH Tavis Smiley 20171030

And by contributions from your pbs stations from viewers like you. Thank you. Waeltlter isaacson have wrin biographies son some of the mos famous many history and his latest is on the life of Leonardo Da Vinci. It is great to be back. Why Leonardo Da Vinci . All the one you mentioned of people who smart, smart people what really counts is being creative. Thats what ben franklin was because he loved art and science and steve jobs, was always at the intersection of beauty and engineering so i thought i am going to do leonardo because hes the ultimate example, somebody that crosses all disciplines and sees the beauty and pattern in nature until he can be an engineer and scientist and artist and understands all of creation and including how we fit into it. What have you learn of studying these persons and your research broadly, talk about your value of creativity and imagination creativity comes in kacuriou and being able to connect your knowledge. Steve jobs is very imaginative. He knew how to do a phone but he said lets do it in a creative way. Leonardo in particular can do anything from dissecting a humans face and knowing every muscle and painting the lips of mona lisa and getting it exactly right. They come from diverse background. You and i were talking about a moment ago of the city you love, new orleans, when you are in a place like florence and new orleans of people of different backgrounds and races and all styles, all together you get the friction that causes creativity. Why friction . Because you rub up against each other and sparks fly. If yours say a jewelry maker and you are in a same shop and a mathematician and yall are discussing things and somebody coming from the arab world because constantinople has fallen. Does it start out as just a search . I think it is a search and something that we can all do. There is certain people who are born with amaziing talents like einstein. More leonar for leonardo, he was not able to go to the university and could not be a notary like his father so he had to be selftaught. Every week he makes things in his notebook like why is the sky blue and why does water swirls when it falls into the pond. Those are types of things if we push ourselves to be observant, we can be leaders as well. What happens if people who tend not to be leaders. The main thing of leonardo of being curious is he was open minded. So if he got new facts, how water bubbles up to the surface or how something would work, he would change his mind based on new facts. As a country, starting with, ben franklin, we were really good of that. We actually lost a little bit of talents now. He lived in florence, an incredibly tolerance city. He was very accepted. You had a backlash of that type of thinking. You had the guy that does the bonfire and vanity as a fundamentalist backlash but after a while, they got rid of him and they go back to a tolerant city. What happened in this country, whats your read of whats happening in this country that allows creativity to be over taken by ideology. Right, the problem is we became too wedded to our partisan and ideology believes. So if something comes along, some idea, you know, whatever it may be like a new way of doing taxes or whether or not how we should be dealing with iraq or north korea, suddenly instead of being open minded to ideas, a whole lot of people got knee jerk to what their talking points are in a partisan way. This did not really happen. Partly because the whole way we do gerrymandering and politics and the whole way our media is focused unlike your show, most media now thats popular is geared to a certain ideology. We got to find that Common Ground again and thats what you tried to do. How did Leonardo Da Vinci distinguishing himself how he start it and because they dont fit in, they dont have the opportunity and the flplatform d etcetera, etcetera, so how did he end up becoming Leonardo Da Vinci . That was why i said i was very lucky. Steve jobs had the wonderful ad that he wrote. He add the mhad misfits thos crazy enough to change the world are the ones that do. You have to respect the person that tells truth of power. And through times, people are comfortable with it and sometimes people react and hunker down. In florence, he gets to be leonardo. Had he been born 50 years earlier or in another place, you know, he may have just been rejected. You think it is still the case for most of us that the places that we are born end up being major characters in our story s stori stories . I think for me is true and leonardo is true. Other people certainly for sign stein si einstein when you are born in jewish and germany and growing up in the 1900 makes you be an outsider. Being an outsider is painful but it helps your art and helps your creativity because you are not following conventions. For me growing up in new orleans, it was a deep part of who i was. I think other people maybe steve jobs, nyou know, his creativity comes from another source. What do you think, walter, between diversities and tolerance and creativity . Well, we said earlier, you picked up on the word friction, friction happens when you see a whole lot of people different together and seeing sparks and lights of their ideas. Sometimes we have the friction as we know in this country where you get people who are resistance to people who are different than they are. That can be a big problem. I think there is a fundamental divide in this country between those who like the creativity that comes from a diverse environment where people are toleran tolerance. And it is not just east coast or west coast, they live in places like chattooga and austin and new orleans and wonderfully Creative Cities and people, somehow when they see the others, they pull back and are afraid. We divided our nation into people who would have loved to grow up with leonardo in florence and all the wackiness that goes on there or those who would rather stay in one place. I am putting you on the spot here. If Leonardo Da Vinci is going to write a book about leadership and lay out his principles. Yeah. What would some of the things in that book be . At the end of the book, i try to lest some of them, things i have learned from leonardo and also of other people that i have written about. Theyre basically leonardos principles. The first is be curious for the sake of curiosity. On one of his sheets, he wrote describe a tongue of a woodpecker. Who would wake up and want to know how a tongue of a woodpeckers looks like. Thats leonardo. I discovered it and it is interesting. It wraps around the brain and does all sorts of things. The reason that i needed to know is that not that it would be useful. Like leonardo because you are curious for the sake of curiosity. The second thing is be more observant. He would watch water flowing into a flow. I pause for a moment and p bubbles, they curl this way and it is the same pattern that you see in the curls of his hair. The curls on the hair of mona lisas and others. The other thing is a lesson he would write is the open to mystery. He believed that there were sharp lines in nature, i am looking at you and you are looking at me. There is not a clear sign of the way our eyes work or optics work. Everything is blurry. They painted badly, they painted like sculptors because of sharp lines. Sometimes you are doing a helicopter for a play that you are playing like leonardo did and he said thats cool and then he tries to do it in real life. Be open to fantasy and daydreaming. People dont have time for being curious for the sake of being curious. If it is not a mean to an end. Its got to be useful. Lets not just study something for the beauty of it. Right. Leonardo would have objected that. There is people who wrote about leonardo and other writings that said, he wasted h is time worrying about the tongue of a woodpecker or the anatomy of a humans heart or worry about the mathematical problems. Loving the square of a circle, thats how you got a vitruvian man. This is a self portrait of him on her in the university trying to figure out how he fits in. You dont do that if you are only interested in knowledge that you can make a buck off of. He was interested in everything he could possible liy know aboue university including how do i fit in . What kind of person was him . You describe something about him, what was it like to hang out with this guy . Was he fun to talk to or collaborative . No. No, hes like tavis smiley. Unlike michelangelo, leonardo had a number of friends. His friends are very diverse, including people coming in from other places. Their mathematicians and play wrights and artisans and architect architects. He realized that creativity is a teams sports. If you are doing a vutruvian man, in my book, hes got Three Friends theyre all doing their drawings and theyre working along them together. At one point, they had dinner and leonardo had a companion who spills wine on some of it so one can imagine this human being, very good looking, very personal and funny had his mood swings, sometimes depress but very human. Even on one of his notebook pages when hes in his 30s and talking about his friends, he likes a recipe for boiling nuts and oil and put in your hair. Hes worried that it happens to you and me going gray and how to make a hair dye to keep his blond curls. Hes interested in his appearance and hes sharing all that with his friends. Hes a very social guy. Asking someone how do they walk on eyes in tice in the netherla asking someone how they fix the dams in milan. Hes always asking people, he wants to be a talk show host. [ laughter ] i am laughing, walter, because i saw something the other day literally, 48 hours ago and i know that everybody watching the program right now had the same experience. You see a kid on the airplane or at the airport or where ever, on tp streets some where, the kids is raveling questions after questions and you see parents who shut that down. I know. This book is the antidote to that. Dont say quit asking questions, whether it is our kids and theyre asking questions that you and i asked in your wonder years when we are like 10, like why is the sky blue or something . When we say dont worry about that or quit asking questions, thats when we take a leonardo and turn them into a notary or something. [ laughter ] yeah, yeah. You know we make sure that we nurture the curiosity in our kids and here is a secret way to do it. If you are curious yourself, your kids are going to be curious. If you are curious of how music works or how a circuit works inside a computer, your kids are going to be curious about that. It is not just you should not say you quit asking questions but more so, you should be apart of that question. Yeah. Speak k ing of baseball, go dodgers yeah just out ofs. Go blue speaking of asking questions, the thing thats fascinating about you. One of the things is that you take on the subject by your own submission whos been written here before. You are not intimidated by that and you came up with new and unique way of seeing a person. What is that . There are other things that you can do. Well, i like writing on people and building on a wealth of knowledge. In this book, i based it on his notebooks. He had 7,000 pages of his notebooks. So many pages in the book and publisher did a good job of high quality colored images and things on good, high quality paper. I based it on his notebooks. I also based it on a lot of other scholars work and even doctors dissertation thats sitting at a library or somebody spending a lot of time doing a specific aspect of leonardo. I like writing about things that fascinated other people and just like leonardo, he painted the last supper but hundreds of artists painted the last supper, i think whether it is Benjamin Franklin and leonardo, each of us can rediscover our only Leonardo Da Vinci and how it relates to our time and our kids and our way of silenting knowledge which is bad and our way of not opening to facts or resisting tolerance sometimes. Leonardo for me at this moment is different than i say Kenneth Clark who wrote 70 years ago about leonardo and wrote about him, he was an art critic, Kenneth Clark, i write about him as somebody who loves technology. I Love Technology and i love the fact that steve jobs made a beautiful iphone. Leonardo is engineered with beauty and art connective. What kind of jobs jobs is clearly a genius, he could not have done that without a collaborator. What kind of collaborator is a Leonardo Da Vinci. It is hard to authenticate some of these paintings. Leonardo had a studio, he had a lot of colleagues and students and apprentices, it was before the artist went off on his own and did it by himself. A lot of leonardos paint ing, e did some of the drawings and some of the apprentices would help and work on it. I doiscover that all the creativity is collaborative. When i asked steve jobs of his projec projects, he said it is a team that i put together. These are a group of friends doing it and with the virgin of the rocks, there is a lawsuit back then in the 1500 because the person who commission id it. Well, leonardo gave too much of it to his assistance. He does the painting and spends more time. A lot of what he did was collaborative because he knew how Important Team work is. Is it short sided on our part to see Leonardo Da Vinci to see first and for most as an artist . No, in the end, the mona lisa and the last supper are the greatest works of human imagine in h istory. Yes, he knew how to do hydraulic engineering and if you told him when he was 40 years old, mainly hes going to remember as a painter, no, no, i can also as he did in a job application, i can also build wonderful buildings and make weapons of war. All of that does come together in his art. When you look at the smile of the mona lisas, you realize there is a scientist there and there is an anantomist there. His ability of art and science makes him the greatest painter but also the greatest genius in history. I want to ask a personal question if i might. Thats what you get taken away from how your life has been enhanced. Walter studying the lives of these other greats. Yeah, we always and at the end of this book, i try to do a whole chapter on a lesson that i take or maybe anybody can take. I used to try to be curious for a reason. I need to learn that in order to do x, y, or z, or this is not useful, why am i reading about it . Now, we get older and we watch the great creative geniuses. We realize knowledge for its own sake has a beauty to it, just like a dodgers game or mozart or a piece of music. We love that. This is very personal here. Every person have written about at a certain point realizes it is about something larger than themselves. When steve jobs was dying, i said what was all i diskoer life was as a river how much can you take out of the river of the great ideas and products before you put in the river. Now i realized that what you put in the river that matters. Leonardo, it was certain things at his death bed, he still had the mona lisa. He kept it for 16 years and still perfecting it. Even of the thing of creating a circle and a square and his last notebook page, hes still working on that mathematical problem and it ends with, but the soup is getting cold because hes being called downstairs to have lunch. Einstein, hes entire 30 years of his life, hes trying to get a you knunified theory. Hes still writing equations even though hes dying, hes trying to get equations to get it and ben franklin. During his lifetime, he donated to the Building Fund of every church in philadelphia. At one point, theyre building a new hall for visiting preachers of the great awakening, he said even the most of constantinople that sent someone here. Hes the largest contributor of synagogue. When he dies, all the ministers and preachers link arms with the rabies or jews. Thats what they were fighting for back then. Thats what was trying to still recapture in the magic of what america can and will be. I love Walter Isaacson and i love his mind and heart, his latest work is called Leonardo Da Vinci. Walter, thank you for joining us my friend. Tavis, it is always good. As always, keep the faith. For more information on todays show, visit www. Tavissmiley pbs. Org, hi, i am tavis smiley, join me next time of a conversation of artist shepa shepa shepard faherty discussing his work. Well see you then. And by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. Thank you. Today on americas test kitchen, julia makes bridget the best shrimp and vegetable kebabs on the grill, jack challenges bridget to a tasting of wholemilk greek yogurt, and dan shows julia the secrets to making authentic persianstyle rice. Its all coming up right here on americas test kitchen. Americas test kitchen is brought to you by the following Fisher Paykel. Since 1934, Fisher Paykel has been designing