Transcripts For CSPAN2 In Depth 20150207

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 r great devices or great ideas but after a while you realize it is not how much you take out of the river but how much you put into the river, what you leave behind so your spirit is so manifest after you have been gone. Whether it is Robert Einstein or Benjamin Franklin or anybody else they did have a connection to something supernatural, something larger than themselves. Host from 2011 to your book and steve jobs, the opening sentence in your the 2004 got a phone call from steve jobs. Why did he call you . I had written a biography of Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein and his it why do you do me next . My first reaction was okay, Benjamin Franklin Albert Einstein, you . Then i realized he had been sick fighting cancer and we dont always look at Creative Minds in business and entrepreneurship. To be able to get very close to and peel back the layers on the greatest business and Technology Innovator of our generation was going to be something truly special. I had known him since 1984 when he came to Time Magazine to show off the original macintosh and we remained moderately good friends off and on especially when i was editing time and he had something he wanted on the cover of time and he told me how often the product was so i really like steve jobs and i liked his passion and when he gave me a call i realized this was something special, to get close to a real genius. Host i asked him why you wanted me to write his biography, you are good at getting people to talk. Guest he was somebody who understood the power of listening and i think i learned that from him a little bit too because when i started working with him i would ask a whole lot of questions and sometimes they would have promises and finally realized if i just let him go, he would go on for an hour or two, i could really listen and try to pick up the rhythms of the way his mind worked. I am not necessarily the best academic historian. I may not be the best reporter when it comes to writing books, but i am pretty good at getting people to be willing to talk to me and i hope that is because i try to listen and i am lucky. Having been at Time Magazine or cnn if i, and asked to speak to mary page i am more likely than the average person to get through so i feel i should try to do that report i should visit gordon more in his house spent time with steve bosnia corollary page because i have been blessed to have access to some of these people because i have been a journalist my whole life so that is what i try to bring to the party. There are people who take the steve jobs will or the the innovators book into a better analysis of what does this mean, how does this lead to leadership lessons but for me what id do is i can call people up sit down listen, try to get the quotes rights, as if it is the first draft for other people who might analyze things from the book. Host is this book steve jobs authorized . Guest not in the technical sense of that term. When we talked he kept saying i dont want to read the book first. He said to me that one of the things that made steve jobs what he was was that he was brutally honest. He said i always tried to be brutally honest and want you to be brutally honest and you will be hard, i wont ask to read the book before it comes out. I wont have any say in whether you use an anecdote or not. I will read it six months after it comes out. That is why summer of 2011 after he sat down with apple the ceo of apple, when did the book come out . You should make the last scene when i stepped down as ceo of apple so i did and the book went to the printers and i was hoping, hoping he was going to be alive when the book came out. He told me last time we talked after i turned the book in he said i promised you i wasnt going to read it when it came out but i will read it in six months later. This was in late august. That made me feel good he will beat the cancer one more time live another year or two years but of course we were not so lucky. Host he had 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 took a lot of things he told me and bring it together and let him have the last word, from different interviews and i took his thoughts those broad thoughts about why he did what he did what made him creative, what was the meaning of life for him so i put those together and put them together from three or four separate formal interviews i hadnt wanted to read it out loud to him just to make sure he was comfortable with it. Also did some things in the book where, personal or tough on people come anecdotes i am not sure you or i would want in books and i made sure he knew about each one of those especially ones where he might doesnt give anybody Stock Options or is mean to somebody 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 before hand because that was the way steve jobs was. She didnt try to sugarcoat things. If you thought you were not going to like something he would say at our right. That is hard for me to do. I am not as brave or courageous as steve was but ive learned from him so the last few interviews with the mic go over things in the book that i thought he would not like. Host if you go to the index and other steve jobs you find mood swings, a sense of behavior and five lines of pages where offensive behavior of is in fair and a couple other things, prankster primal scream therapy . As i say, felt very fortunate that he let me get very up close. Or examples where he was tough on people. He encouraged me to be honest and talk about those things. I knew more about him than i knew about myself. A very self reflective individual. He understood himself extraordinarily well and when he started peeling away the layers was very willing to talk about it and fortunately for me repeatedly encouraged me to put it in and there were a few things i left out, a few things that i thought were unnecessarily painful to some other people in sit and give you much insight on steve so i would go over him with my wife and say that story should be left out, that will hurt this president wont helps the reader that much but every time i would ask him he would they put it in whether it was about his girlfriend or the daughter he had before he got married. All these things, he said i told you, put those things in. Host was the smart . Not exceptionally. Instead, he was guest i compare and contrast to an absolutely wonderful smart guy, bill gates. Bill gates had conventional mental Processing Power. And watching bill gates take large amounts of information, two screens on his desk with full windows on them and processing the information and just be absolutely brilliant. Steve was not brilliant in that way. He didnt have that analytical Processing Power. What he had was an intuitive genius. He would have a feel for things, for what people would like, feel for beauty, feel for what would work and so to me that is what i meant by genius. I wrote about Albert Einstein, Albert Einstein was not the best physicist in europe in 1905. He was a third class patton examiner in the Swiss Patent Office because he couldnt even get his ph. D. They kept rejecting his thesis. She couldnt get a job and the university. So you wouldnt say 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 Norwood Steve jobs ever put steve in the same quantum orbit as Albert Einstein but there was a similarity, which is the genius of steve jobs came from making intuitive leaps, imaginative leaps questioning received wisdom. That is what Benjamin Franklin did, that is what Albert Einstein did, questions things you and i might say are obvious, question the received wisdom of new and, time marches along second by second in respect of of how we observed it. You get a patent court, Albert Einstein saying how do we know that . How would be test that . How do we take two clocks in synchronize them to test that . Likewise with steve jobs, you and i had walkman, we had m p 3 players, a big part of our lives that steve was able to have a feel for beauty and Customer Experience that made him the greatest intuitive genius of the digital age and that is what i meant by that sentence. Host there is one aspect steve jobs had a role in with this book and that was the cover. We have several different covers and the original we will show on the air and show you the paperback cover as well. What was his concern about the cover . When i first did a cover i was with simon and schuster and it was an apple with steve in it, just a test cover and when steve got mad he got very mad. I was on the way to see him, landed in the San Francisco airport, my iphone, the thing you least want to see, 7 missed phone calls from steve jobs, oh oh. I was worried the something happened, return phone call, he starts this reaming me out, yelling at me saying you have no taste. I had no idea what he was talking about. I kept trying to tell me what you are upset about. That cover. I didnt know what he was talking about. Apparently the cover simon and schuster put in an online catalog, the ugliest thing i have ever seen, i dont want to cooperate with you anymore because youre going to put an ugly cover on the book and i said i am sorry i hadnt thought about the cover yet. The book is not even finished and he said unless you agree to let me have some input on the cover i am not going to cooperate any more. That was the easiest decision i ever had to make. Within half a second vice a great, quote suggest a better cover. He said blackandwhite, make it simple. We went through a lot of photographs. I love the Albert Watson photograph the ended up on the cover the high back addiction, the one with you probably have an onscreen now, one of the great photographers at Time Magazine. I worked with robert watson. He did that for Fortune Magazine one of our sister publications, there were four five pictures he was considering including one time had done later i was hoping that we could agree on the Albert Watson picture and we did by the very end and he just wanted that helvetic a tight. If you look at it, it says steve jobs steve jobs by Walter Isaacson. It has no curlicues on it he said i like helvetic a. It is a very simple front. Steve loved foughts ever since he was at reed college. That is why in the mcintosh, the display with dozens of frauds you can use, we have beautiful computers. Those details mated difference. It is a bold font, Benjamin Franklin likes it. He bought franklin bolt and stuff, a lot of them were based on helvetic. He wanted my name in dark tight and his name in light gray, thinking it was my book and i said no. This has nothing to do with me. This is all about you, every word in there is built on something you said. I want to steve jobs in darker tight end me to be more recessive and that is the way it turned out. Eight or nine conversations, with his own artistic directors and great people at apple design directors making sure that coverage that looks so simple, Pretty Simple looking comfort took a lot of work, sometimes simplicity is the ultimate sophistication and sometimes simplicity is pretty difficult because as steve jobs said great design directors often said simplicity isnt about making things easier taking things up, you have to understand the depth of something. It is hard work to create simplicity, that is what steve jobs was able to do on the ipod, the iphone, the ipad, the original macintosh and he pushed to make sure it was done on the cover. Host why the younger steve jobs on the paperback . Wikipedia train guest by the time but hardback was out for a year, that photograph was iconic, Apple Computer had used on their posters, in the memorial services, it had become the standard iconic photographs. I think there were people at apple and simon and schuster, dont keep building on that, try something, i saw the picture for Rolling Stone in the yearly 1980s in which steve is in the exact same pose. You have on the paperback and i thought well, this will just be something fresh and new. The always used the phrase think different and whether it was Albert Watson or apple or simon and schuster, everybody felt it wouldnt be thinking different if we used that. I think apple fell rightly too that that iconoclastic image was something that they owned and i wanted to make sure with the paperback, we try to think different. Host was the important lorayne powell in steve jobss life . A person of deep moral character, somebody who helps kids from underserved neighborhoods get into college, somebody deeply deeply understood. Steve jobs. And i think he would say to me that his life wouldnt have been the same had he not met her and had she not helped make him who he was and by the way if all whole family. Unlike a lot of powerful people he wasnt out on the circuit everyday, 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, wonderful kids and he would talk, deep serious conversation. No playing on the i phone or ipad during dinner. As a family man steve was sometimes rough around the edges whether it was at home or the office or at work or whatever but one thing you will discover is even though he was a rough around the regis, at work he developed a team of people who were deeply loyal to him. More often just loyal, they loved him and likewise at home, he has around him a family who is deeply loyal to him and deeply loves him. So when people say steve jobs was a pretty rough character at times, he had an abrasive personality at times, he could be mean to people sometimes, yes, but i hope you look at what happens is he is able to have deep love and deep loyalty at home and at the office put it into context. Some people are mean and nasty and everybody hates them so steve had something else. Wasnt that he was sometimes hard to deal with, he really connected to people, he inspired them, he made some loved him. That to me is the essence of steve jobs. Every now and then i will read articles about bosses who tried to be like steve jobs and try to be tough for people who try to be like steve jobs and be brutally honest. Dont try it this because steve could pull off because the 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 connect emotionally to was so when you talk about his home life, his office life, there were people around him, his wife his kid who truly felt said sheep passionate appreciation and love for him and so it was more complex and some people may get out. I wish i had conveyed that better in the book. Some people read the book and say he was kind of mean. 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, i would give up anything in the world 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 recent book the innovators as an electronic book who loves ham radios and you give your ham radio address. Guest john thomas speeder. I am old enough to have gotten my first experiences on circuits for ham radio and getting to play with a ham radio. Host remember when vacuum tubes gave way to transistors. You write that historians of science are sometimes wary about calling periods of great change revolutions because they view progress as evolutionary. Are we in a revolution or evolution . Guest we are in a revolution like the Industrial Revolution. We had the steam engine that connect with mechanical processors like blooms a weaving machines will whatever and suddenly we move into an Industrial Age where machines and people are having to Work Together, they do products. We have that here with microchip, the computer the internets all working together so three inventions each of which would have been important but the combination of packets with digital networks, microprocessors and microchips with the computer revolution we have leads to a whole new way of doing not only information but conducting business your social life so it is definitely at revolution and i do remember, as the person, a quote somebody, a great historian of science at harvard who wrote about the scientific revolution, says theres no such thing as a scientific revolution and this is a book about it. And they knew they were going to revolution. So talk about introducing the book says a kid. You look at at vacuum tube and figure out how it works, if it is burned out or not. It is an amplifier and don office which so how does the circuit do logic just by us stepbystep of on off switches like that . So you get a feel and this is where i worry today is that people, my daughters generation or whatever dont quite have a feel about how the on off switches and logical circuits logic gates and algebra all come together to say we can have a machine that can do these tasks. Host you say math is spiritual. Guest a lovelace the beginning of the innovators, lord byrons daughter, the great romantic poet, she has a political streak in her but her mother was the mathematician and as you might imagine knowing something about lord byron his wife was not particularly fond of lord byron, was a little too much of a romantic and had heard tutored in mathematics. That was some antidote to being romantic or being a poet and what she does is create what she calls political science. The combination of poetry with science, art, technology. This is the essence of everybody i have written about. Ben franklin does it. Albert einstein does it. It has been sort of what has driven progress since Leonardo Da Vinci as a great engineer and artist combines the two disciplines in all of his work. To me, that notion that theres a connection between mack and Natural Beauty is something important for us to have a feel for like she did. A lot of people say i dont love math they get upset we dont do enough Art Education or humanities education and i agree, we need the arts and humanities that makes us who we are but i also feel people love the arts and humanities should try to have a feel for the beauty of math as well just as you love shakespeare, you should people would be appalled, some of my humanist friend to somebody said they did know the difference between hamlet and macbeth but would brag they dont know the difference between a transistor and that resister or a gene and the chromosomes, and mathematics is just the good lords brushstroke for something beautiful in the universe and math was like a line of a fathers poetry, people say math is hardly take a line of lord byrons poetry she walks in beauty like the night. That is a pretty tough line but if you are a known lovelace you can visualize that. Just like she could visualize the beauty of an equation or an algorithm. You write down the rhythms and show what a computer can do. In the 1830s. She realizes the beauty in a mathematical phrased and she can visualize that just as she can visualize she walks in beauty like the night. That is what i meant by saying there is of beauty in both the arts, humanities and technology and science on the other side. Host you have a time line in the innovators which kicks off with lovelace, all these pictures, etc. What is it she contributed . Guest when she sees the connection of the beauty of art to sciences comes up with the general purpose computer. For examples she travels to the midlands of england as the young woman and sees steam engines and looms and they do things they use punched cards so that the lives would show beautiful patterns and her father was a light, is only speech in the house of lords was smashing these looms because they thought they put people out of work. She looked those and said with those punch cards it makes beautiful patterns. Jihadists brand, a friend named Charles Babbage build and not numbers crunching machine and she realized with punched cards the analytical engine as she wrote and published in the unusual for women in the eighteenth 30s to publish in scientific journals, with a punched card these machines can do anything, not just numbers do anything that can be noted in symbols, words, music, art, design, a general purpose computer. Host you quote her saying the bounds of arithmetic the idea of applying cards had occurred. The analytical engine does not occupy Common Ground with a mere calculating machines. It holds a position holy its own in enabling a mechanism to combine general symbols and successions of unlimited variety and extend and uniting link is established between the operations of matter and the abstract products. Guest a beautiful way of saying someday we will have computers. Host how many people did you talk to . How many inventors and innovators in you talk to . Guest i assume 100 if you want to count. Quintin in 1992 or 1993 i became head of Digital Media for Time Magazine and time warner. So you would run into people like andy grove who became a man of the year at time and people like that so throughout the 90s i was always wanting to do a history of this digital revolution because each day in a generation has a great revolution weather is the American Revolution, we know about George Washington ben franklin or the french revolution or the Industrial Revolution or the scientific revolution and i had a feeling we were living through this revolution and had a chance to meet all these people. In the 1990s i started interviewing people, got a cover story on bill gates talking about the when i was focused on this book for the last six seven years off and on finishing the steve jobs book i would see gordon more or mark andreas or talk to him at least or the Worlds Largest absolutely truly wonderful guy who actually with another wonderful person write the internet protocols. How do you make an internet out of it . I got a chance to be up close with these people and as i said earlier on the show what i hope to bring to the parties do a little reporting, to find these people and have them talk to me because there are a lot of people who can do better analysis than i do. To sit around and talk over dinner and tell me exactly why the original protocols were written the way they were. I did a lot of interviews for the book. Host if you were covering the Auto Industry would it be like talking to henry ford and Dodge Brothers . Guest these are people who invent things. The early people early on in the internet where no longer on computers, no longer with us. Even robert boyce, one person i wish i could have talked to. He was coinventor of the microchip. Working with bill shockley, a originally, who had created as part of the team the transistor in and all that does is take semiconducting material like silicon that sort of can conduct electricity sort of but resists sort of but if you dont by making it more in pure adding boron or something, you can make semiconducting qualities, make it an on office which, replace horrible vacuum tubes with the transistor and what bob noyce does is with a group of people, this is all team work, think about how to edge a lot of transistors under one ship of silicon you really have cool ways to put a lot of transistors on one chip of silicon. That is what bob always does but he does something even more. He creates a Company Called intel. It is the new type of company that has no great hierarchy. Is not driven from an Organization Chart from the top down. They sit in a big golden space and he draws something and he says here you are in the center and you connect everybody else here. That whole new way of doing business in the digital age and he was a mentor for 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 with andy grove, andy grove knew how to get microchips out the door, got to focus or cant do it that or keeping riding herd on the rest of the team. Of billions of creating a new type of corporate structure. And how do you form a right team, borden more, doing a Baseball Team who would be the pitcher or the catcher or utility infielder. And got to interview board more at the exponential rise in Processing Power of of microprocessor but as i talked to borden more a lot about what it was like to work with bob noyce i got to know andy grove who is still recess who was man of the year at time, got to figure out these people i wish i had been able to interview a down lovelace, and i wanted to make allen turned a bit famous because among people who know computers he is very famous but people who dont just as my book was coming out, benedict, a badge played him in the imitation game. He is the guy who is going to make alan turing famous. Host how true to life is that movie . Guest it is very true to life but like any good move your great movie takes some literary license. There are things in the movie that didnt exactly happen most notably dont know if you have seen the movie a russian soviet spy is not actually working with alan tearing so that is the little bit of literary license but what is true about the movie that is so important is some key facts one of which is he was an outsider. A loner. He was gay. Along distance runner. He was not good at dealing with other people but he discovers trying to break the german code, developing the concept of a computer based on his reading of lovelace, the universal computing machine, he has a logical computing machine all based on the general purpose computer notion today, if he is going to break the german code he is going to need to Work Together with us as a team so par with through his time one of the women programmers in the movie, brilliant job in the movie says to him as to the others we are with you, you have got to work collaborative the and he does. Key lesson of the movie. Many other lessons of the movie. The invitation came. The name of the movie is based on a paper alan turing wrote at the end of the war about Artificial Intelligence. Can machines think . He believed perhaps in his own personal life that humans and machines were both programmed and maybe you would never be able to tell them apart. The invitation game at a certain point a computer can imitate human and you wouldnt know the difference and machines are thinking. Actually, that successful in reaching tory like Artificial Intelligence but we are working in symbiosis and partnership. When he writes the paper about the imitation game he calls this lovelaces objection this notion that machines will never be able to take on their own. And interesting tension and very tragically as you know he preprogrammed, they tried to have him arrested for homosexual acts tried to give him chemical hormone treatment to stop him as if he is of machine and you can reprogram him. He takes in stride for a while but then takes an apple, dissidence cyanide and bites into it. Tragic but also makes you realize the imitation game is over. Alan turing who was inhuman. The machine wouldnt have done that. So much depth you can get from the movie and Andrew Hodges has written a book called the enigmas, great biography of alan turing. I have a chapter on alan turing the innovators ends with something called a the forever which is how her contact with the symbiosis between humans and machines how fat related to alan turings quest for Artificial Intelligence, and i find that all very interesting but to get back to your question, the great truths about alan turing, i conveyed those great truth, like any movie, that didnt happen with the soviet spy. Host good afternoon and welcome to booktv cspan2, 48 hours of nonfiction books and authors every weekend and this is our indepth show when we invite one author to talk about his or her body of work and this one is biographer author, journalist Walter Isaacson. Walter isaacson is the author of these books, first book came out in 1986 the wise clinton, six friends and the world they made. Evan thomas with his coauthor with that book. 1992 Henry Kissinger, kissinger, benjamin frankllin, einstein in 2007 steve jobs 2011 and the innovators came out last year. Walter isaacson is also the ceo of the Aspen Institute former editor of time, former head of cnn and former chairman of the broadcasting board of governors. Walter isaacson will be with us for the next three hours. Put the numbers on screen if you would like to dial in and participate in the conversation here are the numbers, 20297488200, in the east and central time zones, age 201 for those in the mountain and pacific time zones. If you cant get through on the phone lines and want to participate try social media, booktv is our twitter handle, you can follow the conversation on facebook facebook. Com booktv. At the top of the page some video of Walter Isaacson that we shared earlier this weekend you can make a comment underneath that video in the Comment Section and finally send an email, booktv cspan. Org and begin taking your calls and social media comments in a minute. A couple more of your books before we get the calls. This is the benjamin frankllin book and you write the most interesting thing franklin invented and continually reinvented was himself. Host guest i love ben franklin and theres a good story about ben franklin that he tells. When he is a young tradesmen who arrived in philadelphia and he is trying to be a good civic person, he formed the club of people, the working class, shopkeepers, they make a list of all the values, industry, honesty, frugality and masters all 12 of them, shows them to the people in the club and one of the people in the club says franklin, you forgot a virtue. What is that . The friend says humility. You might try that one for a change and franklin says i was never very good at the virtue of humility. I never mastered it but i was very good at the pretense of humidity. And he says and i learned the pretense of humility was just as useful as the reality of humility because it made you listen to the people around you and find Common Ground and that was the essence of the middleclass, we the middling people of democracy that they were trying to forge. To me, franklin not only doing that self improvement which was his goal but then writing about it and doing an autobiography in which he writes the autobiography so we all know the way he was, that to me is why he was constantly inventing reinventing and polishing his invention of himself for history. Host how wellknown was he . Who can you compare him to today . He was probably one of the best known people in the world by the time he becomes in the western world i should say. By the time he becomes the envoy to france after he has done everything from the electricity experiments, the lightning rod, been part of the continental congress, helped at the declaration of independence, he goes to france because of his writings and because of his electricity experiments, they carry him by sedan chair to the steps of the economy in paris to meet full fare. You talk about inventing and reinventing himself, he wears a coonskin cap and a backwoods coach because the people in france who have been reading russo like this notion of the natural philosopher from out in the wood. Ben franklin never lived in the wilderness even though the french like all of them the american colonies in boston, philadelphia and london but he takes this cat and coast to be natural philosopher coming from this wilderness of the country or land called america to meet with the fringe and he has the plan to the hills. The little coins of him. I try to do it in the benjamin frankllin 11 book. Respect, the rivalries they had but john adams lamented that the history of the American Revolution will be ben franklin too much credit for it. But he deserves a lot of credit for inventing what we are as a country. Host when it comes to the Founding Fathers who was it close to . Guest jefferson is much under, jefferson is a protege who succeeds him as ambassador to paris. What they particularly shared is what we have been talking about on this show a belief that an educated person should love science should love the arts, should love music, should understand electricity that was the enlightenment, that period in which actor isaac newton and all those others the laws of science and the laws of statecraft and the laws of how you live your life came together and i think the two great icons of the enlightenment in america are Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. One big difference, jefferson writes the first draft of the declaration but theres a committee to help meet the last Time Congress did Good Committee ben franklin and john adams and Thomas Jefferson on it. Jefferson writes we hold these truths to be sacred franklin takes it and puts quote selfevident. The notion of science, there are certain logical ways that come from rationality and region, not dictate of a particular religion. This goes on and out with certain inalienable rights. John adams putting in by their creator. They are balancing the role of Divine Providence with the role of rights and rationality and reason in creating our nation and this to me, you can see the mind of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson working. Host Ben Franklins epitaph he wrote himself, the body of ben franklin, printer, like the cover of an old book, its contents worn out and stripped of its lettering and gilding lies here, food for worms but the work shall not be lost, for it will as he believed appear once more in a new and more elegant edition, revised and corrected by the author. Guest he considered himself a printer. He signs himself when he goes to a lodge or something ben franklin, printer. Secondly, hes sort of had an unamused outlook about life and even the afterlife. The very last, one of the last letters when he is dying, very religious man says do you believe in the divinity of jesus christ . They believe in god, the actor like . He had written that epitaph about revised by the author for a better edition but he never he did antagonize. He had a generalized diaz stick feel about the beauty of creation or whenever so he writes back i never quite figured that out but i will figure out soon enough meaning he was about to die. No need to start worrying about it now. Host Albert Einstein the year 1905. Why was that such a big year for him . Guest that is when he is a patent examiner who hasnt been able to get his ph. D. But questioning newtons wisdom that time marches along no matter how we observe it. The swiss had gone to standard time zones and swiss people as you know our swiss. They really care, bernie exact same instant in zurich so if you synchronize clocks you got to send a signal between the two clocks signals travel at the speed of light, light signal or radio and you have a pant examiner saying what if i caught up with one of those signals . Wouldnt the light waves seem static . If i am traveling through the clocks really fast with a synchronize differently from the . Going as fast as the other clock so he comes up with this mental leap that time is relative depending on your state of motion. The speed of light is constant but time is relative so that is special relativity. He does that exact same spring another paper talks about the fundamentals of quantum theory. Light is both a wave and a particle. Particles of light there is also a wave ended is a whole concept that becomes quantum theory. You have two great scientific piece out of the pillars that bring us into the 20th century that take us from newtons mechanics into a work a new world, relativity and quantum theory. Both happen in the spring of 1905 when he is sitting on a stool doing thought experiments as a patent examiner and that is why it is called a miracle year for einstein. Host what do those things mean to us today . Guest every single great advance almost of the 20th century has the fingerprints of Albert Einstein on it. Space travel, the splitting of the atom gps, Television Even the microchip and microprocessor. When they are making the transistor in my book the innovators you need people knowing experimentally how to fix a piece of silicon and it becomes a semiconductor in a different way but you also need to learn, a great first perfectly dedicated to understanding this Quantum Mechanics that rises from 1905 and wins the nobel prize handbills shockley working with him to do at and they can envision the dance of electrons at the surface state of semiconducting material based on the Quantum Mechanics that come out of feinsteins paper. Whether it is transition in the microchip for space travel or the gps in your iphone or the splitting of an atom which by the way is not only a scientific advance but i huge geopolitical strategic issue which is how we use the atom bomb which is something it is hard to think of something that makes our lives what it is today that doesnt have a couple fingerprints of Albert Einstein on it. Host he spent time at princeton but his papers at cal state. Guest caltech, the physical papers are at Hebrew University most of them. There are a set of copies in jerusalem even when he is dying, on his deathbed he has nine pages of equations which sought to unify relativity theory with quantum theory because they dont quite reconciled. Host we will show that formula. Host guest one last line dribbles off. I want to interview gordon more, when i get the chance. I love seeing the physical documents so i went to caltech, wonderful people at caltech. People who run papers projects but even though there is a copy there i felt i ought to pay up a visit to the shrine and see the paper at Hebrew University so i went there so that is where the papers are and something really cool all viewers should do right now is starting about two months ago caltech, princeton and Hebrew University all agreed to take the papers and put them on line. People visit Hebrew University or caltech but it is so cool because now you concur outsource, not only are all of the papers on line but the english translations so you can read hundreds of letters in 1905 if you are trying to figure out this complicated controversy, what role does his wife play in the mathematics of special relativity, or go read the papers, go on line and see the legacy he wrote to his friend who was helping him in the patent office. From this excitement these days the week and get the papers on line i really salute the papers project for doing that. Host towards the end of the book you write for some people miracles serve as evidence of einsteins existence. For einstein the absence of miracles reflected Divine Providence. Guest einstein believed there was the spirit in the laws of the universe. I have a whole chapter on feinstein and god because he wrote about in a lot and answered a lot of questions about it but he believed in a spirit manifesting of the laws of the universe in the face of which we must be humbled in and he said that is my sense of a divine being somebody who created things according to rules. The amazing thing is the universe doesnt didnt necessarily have to have these elegant beautiful rules like equals mc squared but it does. He did not believe in a personal god. The did not believe in a got you plan long and hard would intervene and break the laws of the universe so the new England Patriots would win the super bowl if you play hard enough or whatever you were praying for. And he said, you do, for some people miracles show god exists but for me it is the elegance of the laws of the universe and the fact that they always hold. That to me is a miracle. That to me is spiritual. That is kind of interesting to move to that level of thinking it is in that spirit of immutable laws, laws of deep beauty, complexity, the equations for general relativity is pretty complex but it is still there and always holds. In some ways that is evidence of a divine existence rather than praying for a miracle and having a miracle happen. Host we have two minutes to cover the cold war and Henry Kissinger before we go to calls. Cheri kissinger book 1992 for a while after this book came out he didnt speak to me. Why is that . Guest like the steve jobs book if you read his Nobel Peace Prize citation or his own memoirs it doesnt do me justice. But he is a very funny guy. I was at dinner last night, was there and saw him. I would consider him somebody i respect, somebody i find has a deep, great sense of world order and how the world works and anybody who has a biography about him will think at first could have been more favorable and the thing about Henry Kissingers i dont think he had a finger to feel at that time when he was nixons National Security adviser and secretary of state. For the values and idealism there has to be an underpinning to Foreign Policy in the democratic system so he is a great realist who understood balance of power but to me my fundamental criticism is we have to have the moral and idealistic foreignpolicy that has to be woven together. I do think that when i was editor of time i thought i wonder if Henry Kissinger will come back because he was annoyed at parts of the book and i got a phone call, walter, even the 30 years war had to end at some point so i will come to your dinner so he has a good sense of humor. You dont always have to agree with certain things nixons Foreign Policy did when it came to cambodia in dealing with the bombing of North Vietnam and a lot of things. One can secondguess and if you read him you feel the deep understanding of statecraft and the creation of world order and speak of the cold war, he was able to do brilliant out of the box thinking to balance of russia and china to create a triangular diplomacy where opening to china and detente with russia as we pull out of vietnam preserves the United Statess influence and power in the world after a retreat from vietnam by doing this triangular balance with russia, china, a Creative Leap that even bright people best and brightest, hadnt thought of earlier and that preserve our influence in world. Host the wise men, six friends and the world they made charles atchison, Robert Lovett john mccoolly with a the essence of the establishment . Guest they were. I wrote that book with a friend, evan thomas covering Ronald Reagans campaign. I see these people handing out leaflets to the establishment and 7 who is a friend of mine from college had come from a more prep School Background saying what is this establishment thing and we decided to demystify it by writing six people at the core of the establishment there were three republicans, three democrat. They at passion for rising above politics. 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 a lot of letters in the archives. Writing emails, but they kind of disappear after 20 years. Were not writing great notebooks or journals or diaries the i way people and the wise men did. So conversations happen not just by interviews. Now, one of the things i learned writing about kissinger, the wise men and others, you read gi the documents, theyll give you part of the picture. Th then you interview the people, theyll say, oh, yeah i wrote that letter but here is theor real reason. 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. Youre watching booktv on cspan2 with top nonfiction books and authors every weekend. Booktv, television for serious readers. On booktv this weekend, were live from politics prose bookstore in washington d. C. With rafia zakaria, author of the upstairs wife about her experiences in pakistan. We take a trip to corpus christi, texas to bring you the areas literary scene as well as a visit to Johns Hopkins university to talk with professors for our college series. On after words, toby around den recalls his time embedded in afghanistan. Stephen brill and dr. Ezekiel emanuel discuss the Health Care System and mark krotov talks about the decision to release the Senate Intelligence Committee Report on torture. For a complete Television Schedule booktv. Org. Booktv, 48 hours of nonfiction books and authors. Television for serious readers. Host Walter Isaacson, who is walker percy . Guest he was one of my original heroes mentor. D uncle by marriage, one of those things, so we called him uncle walker. We used toim go across lake pontchartrain from new orleans where i grew up, and wed go fishing on a lazy river over there, and ann percy was a friend of ours, and we couldnt figure out what her dad did. 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 wee. 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, and there is when you connect the humanities, she has been a lawyer and on the washington Womens Foundation helping other people that notion of being engaged in society is always helpful when you turn brown biography with society . Facebook comment. In the wise men you write about the american establishment. Is there an establishment mentality today . What is it . Who or what determined those in this establishment . Guest there is an establishment mentality, niter to elevate nor to denigrate. Theres a general consensus at the Aspen Institute and the aspen strategy group, it is run by Brent Scowcroft was george bush the elders National Security adviser and joe nye who is a professor at harvard, democratic administration. Foreign relations the various sorts of established view of the world which believes in free minds freemarket liberal democracy, it believes in balancing the realist view of Foreign Policy meaning National Interest and if we talk about ukraine and russia is this the best place to assert it . Is there a balance we can do with russia . With an idealistic approach to Foreign Policy which is we want democracy we want to fight against people who are tyrannical so that wrestling for the balance between idealism and realism and with interventionism versus a more humble Foreign Policy, you can see that happening in the establishment. The good thing about the United States is the establishment is always being challenged. Whether it is ted cruz or rand paul or the Republican Party or the democratic party, and some of them were misguided in the past 15 years, including in my opinion the invasion of iraq. It ended up being miscalculated. Challenging the establishment view the american Foreign Policy establishment from democrats and republicans was generally in favor of the invasion of iraq. That was a mistake so we need outsiders who will challenge that view. What are we thinking . Why are we getting into this . The balance between the establishment view the wise men represented in the late 1940s and the outsiders, this is why democracy tends to be so much better even as one of my criticisms of Henry Kissinger, he doesnt realize that is the strength of democracy when people get to challenge you and say no, what you doing . Why we going into cambodia or vietnam . That to me makes them a democracy stronger at waging Foreign Policy. Host the wise clinton, of the six, how many did you get to talk to . George mackinnon very much so tip oneill is no longer alive. Spent a lot of time with john mc who died as the book came out. Likewise was able harry man. Near the end as we were finishing the book, his wife would let us sit by governor harry mans dad and talk about that and i got to speak to acheson had both died, i talked to a lot of their children and colleagues but working with evan thomas, my coauthor on that book, we were both journalists it was a chance to look at archives, all the letters. Acheson, harry met and love it wrote each other twice a day. Got the conversation, then we could go to him and say what did you mean about this thing on laos, one of the things we were able to do in writing that book was combine the ability to go to the archives New York Historical society, also go to the people and say when you got that letter what were you really aiming at . I like this intersection and able to be part of the tween the journalistic approach to history and an archival academic approach to history . Host are we losing some of that . Guest people email a couple times a day. I remember sitting in steve jobss house saying what about the emails e. U. Or press coming back apple, 19971998 . Hugely dramatic period. He didnt like letters, didnt keep a journal. Memory is pretty good ball memories are bad or what ever. It was the next computer working in the company and he has it in his house and they tried to figure out how do we get access to these emails that were composed on the next operating system nt couldnt get those emails so sometimes i talk to archivists, and we talked about the history of the digital age, and get peoples emails. Four five techies, i found there emails when i was running Digital Media arguing with cbs, trying to create pathfinder and from broadband systems. Here are all my emails but i would hope when they get the papers of bill gates and the papers off of a rock, started venturecapital in the west coast, we not only need your papers but give as your Old Computers and save your emails because i worry we are not archiving emails very well. I read an unbelievably good piece last night in the new yorker about the internet archive which i always admired but never knew how it worked and these are people in San Francisco in consortiums around the world archiving every your twitter feet, when twitter is affecting the events and ferguson or Tahrir Square how are we going to get those tweets 50 years from now when we are writing about what really happened . How will we get those emails or facebook pages or will web pages 50 years from now and god knows where they are . We have to have a real effort to archive peoples emails fallen terribly. Not like the nsa, but when you are donating your papers and bill gates, make sure your emails are part of it, if you are trying to archive all the newspapers lets archive the twitter, twitter is doing that and facebook and all the web pages, people should read from the internet archives. Host Cheryl Mccloy was nominated for 4 biography on jane franklin. Guest the sister of ben franklin and this is the cool thing. Wont let us all the time. You have the letters from the French Foreign minister but also the letters he is writing jane, talking about what he is doing and that is a different conversation ended is great the way she tried to create a biography even though we dont know much about jean but the biography that is based on the letters to her brother and from her brother. Host elizabeth in willoughby, ohio, you are on with Walter Isaacson. Caller thank you. You have to do the innovators part ii. There is a lot of information you have been covering in the innovators that i am looking forward to reading about, especially the women. Having studied i know it is hard to get into it but the thing is maybe i would like to see that book on da vinci. After taking a math class and an art class sometimes all at the same time i begin to understand we dont understand the reaction between the arts music, and engineering, and the other half of our lives. Hart Senate Office building. When most artists trying to do general relativity as i described before in 191415 and all hell was breaking loose, he pulls out his violin and plays mozart as he paces up and down because he believes mozarts chords help connect with the harmonies of the universe. Ben franklin is that day. Lovelace as i said that way is great at connecting art through science. One problem with the innovators and criticism of it is i get four or five letters saying you left out the more clay ford left out dartmouth for whatever. I would like to someday have a multimedia crowds forced open source book. Maybe with the digital royalty system and i could share in the royalty in which people take a book like the innovators and that is fair for the foundation here is what happened is xerox park with this innovator, with supercomputers at mit or carnegiemellon. All the people who have written saying heres a story you had written in but somehow have a way to crowd source but let and author curate a living and growing. I hope that is an innovation we will have in five years especially if there is a way to have the bit cooling or cybercurrency allowing anyone to create something for a book like that to get a piece of the royalties for a piece of payments for the book. Host one vote so far for da vinci. We will see how this goes in the next 40 minutes. Alan, you are on booktv with Walter Isaacson. Caller thank you for taking my call. Thank you for the wonderful books and for the people who are shaping the way we live. Look forward to the next book. In your opinion, is it and other characteristics that all the innovators share something that in your view transcends time space, background gender . I feel they innovate in spite of all the turmoil going around they challenge that. What is your opinion . Caller a couple trades are important as different as ben franklin is, as steve jobs. They both have but rebellious they all do. Einstein runs away from high school, Benjamin Franklin does, steve jobs dropped out of college. That is why i dont get asked to speak at a lot of graduations. Lot of people drop out. So they have but rebellious spirit to it. Steve jobs captured that when he comes back to avalanche had to write a manifesto that becomes a television ad. You may remember the misfits, the rebel, round pegs in square holes. People whose think different, crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do. Steve had a motto doing the original macintosh, they put up a pirate flag above the building where the macintosh team was and said it is better to be up high rate than to join the navy. You would find that in einstein and ability to question conventional thinking, to think of the box without knowing what is in the box and to challenged conventional of 40 and received wisdom. That to me is awesomely important if youre going to be an innovator. Host Benjamin Sorensen tweets in who in todays world most closely lives up to those featured in your book . Is innovation limitless . Innovation is limitless. As i said about elon musk who is entering number one to that question is harder to do in the non Digital World fan in the Digital World. You can do facebook in your dorm room but if you do things like biotech or rocket ships or batteries or e decker cars, you face a lot more regulation you face is a need to not only in no fate but to collaborate and pushed the bounds of reality. I love what larry page is doing, jeff bezos is awesome because he is connecting commerce to innovation and bursting into Cloud Computing so we are all empowered to create business in the cloud as ibm and others are doing. I think jeff bezos is truly awesome. The way Cheryl Sandburg and Mark Zuckerberg are doing facebook, it is not just a social network but a platform on which to build things i think we are seeing innovation all over the place. I ran into tony fidel yesterday. He was the person who helped design the ipod but he is creating an internet of things where my thermostat my garage door, whatever it may be are all connected and i can sort of help my wife become better through connecting things. There is enormous innovation, in the u. S. Why we are more innovative society, with who are we to question authority . There was discussion i was appalled and horrified and didnt like what people did to Henry Kissinger but we live in a country where that happens. In china and other places maybe theres and as much questioning of of 40 so you dont get as much innovation. Host as head of the Aspen Institute who was the most fascinating speaker you heard . Guest we had great World Leaders from tony blair to she moaned perez to Hillary Clinton barack obama was there before george bush, the elder george bush, have all spoken at the Aspen Institute. People who are doing new things at the cutting edge of science and policy and technology who are less well known come to aspen ideas festival or our action forum or our strategy groups. Eric lander, someone you may not know. Hope he writes a book someday so you have him on. He is helping do more sequencing of the genome than mit and harvard but he is the humanist as well so he understands the we will have databases that have our genetic material and help us build new drugs and everything that privacy concerns will be affected and we may have a system where you say count me in, i want my Genetic Information to be shared so people can make it, those fascinate me. That is why i like being at the institute because it is not just about political stuff, but interesting issues where science intersects society, policy and business that i hope we can have practical solutions. Host lee in arizona, go ahead with your question or comment. Caller took me 7 calls and an hour to get through. Second on da vinci. A baby is born knows nothing, doesnt know anything. What they do is watch and listen and as they grow older they get more curious. I think curiosity is the key to all these people. Some other things i agree with, collaborating because all the things are true but curiosity is the key to everything. Host where are youwould you do in bolden city . Caller i am retired and have 500 books in my motel room. Host from what i retired . From what i you retired . Caller i dont think you have the time. The most important was when i was a reporter and editor for a newspaper. Guest he is talking about curiosity. That to me is something that you see in every great innovator. I am so glad you raised it. Lets take einstein for example. When he was 6 years old his father gave him up compass. The needle pointed north no matter how he turned it and he was mesmerized by it because nothing is touching the needle, there is no particle in the needle, trying to figure out what is a force field . How does a field of work like that . You and i remember getting a compass when we were kids and a moment or two later, a dead squirrel and we were on to something else. There was a passionate fur curiosity for einstein and that compass needle. When he was on his deathbed getting at unified field theory connecting gravity particle physics and relativity and the unified theory, it was told that curiosity that came from the compass needle, why does it point north . You can see that in ben franklin. Why does it take a ship all little less time to get to europe than to come back . As a 17yearold notice the temperatures of the water as he was sailing to england for the first time and was able to chart the gulfstream. Einstein worrying about why is the sky blue, things you and i might not even question of the curious about, he questions the obvious. I would put collaboration, rebelliousness, a passion for perfection like steve jobs had but also curiosity up there. Host new york city, this isnt the way to ask a question of Walter Isaacson live on booktv at the moment but if it is here is my question. This why does the innovators not include jack kilby . I realize you couldnt include everyone but robert noyce is there. Guest jack kilby is in the book in two different places and jack kilby when he gets the nobel prize and has such a wonderful answer when the academy says the whole digital revolution comes from that, it reminds me of what the beavers said to the rapid at the foot of the hoover dam, i didnt build it but it is based on an idea of mine. They were, inventors of the microchip, maurice founded what is now intel kilby at Texas Instruments the ability to have that rivalry, but also to collaborate and Work Together may be the index is messed up. Is in the index . I urge people to read about jack kilby because truly i admire his spirit and his ability to figure out how to edge transistors on silicon, so creative and doing it and they have intellectual property dispute. A patent war over who did it. Years ago to the courts, finally the people at Texas Instruments like kilby and people like noise say lets just settle this and move on. Host big section on jack kilby in the innovators. You are on the air. Caller good afternoon. I wanted to say i am really enjoying the conversation and the reason i am calling is i would like to place a suggestion to Walter Isaacson since he is head of the Aspen Institute. I am doing it more in the way of a plea. The suggestion is this. The Aspen Institute as you mentioned early on the show focuses on developing leadership. And there are two Critical Issues illustrated by three books one of which you referenced i there books that influenced you or books you are currently reading . Or the two areas i am thinking about i the problems that exist currently with wall street, or specifically have in mind the behavior wall street engage in fed eventually resulted in the recession. The second thing, this relates to the book you referenced, the diss functionality in our Health Care System. The three books i have in mind host can you miss those three book so we can get some more calls . Caller sure. Do good job analyzing this. One book, americas bitter pill, another one called 13 bankers by Simon Johnson and another book called in bed with washington by mary doyle. Those areas would be excellent areas. Guest bitter pill started as a Time Magazine cover, an amazing look at the dysfunction allenby of the Health Care System and i would couch it as people to read it. I havent read the other two books. The financial industry, one of the best things we could do is have a disruptive technology. You see glimmers of it in bitcoin. And be able to have a digital and fiber currencies that provide alternatives to some of the Banking Systems and might enable commerce in a better way. George in fort myers, fla. We are listening. Caller we are listening please go ahead with your question or comment for Walter Isaacson. Caller einstein described himself as a d terminus just like mark twain did and i am wondering how they got there. Guest the issue of free will versus determinism is one of the richest most difficult topics people have wrestled with since plato and socrates, certainly einstein wrestles with it steve jobs wrestles with that. I am not sure anybody will never resolve it. It is at the core of alan turings imitation game question which is do we have free will in a way that is different or consciousness that is different from what preprogrammed machine . Einstein was a d terminus but he wins the nobel prize for his Quantum Mechanics or quantum theory paper on the photoelectric effect which basically says at the subatomic level things happen by chance statistics but not determine nancy and there is an indeterminacy at the subatomic level which by the way means there is indeterminacy at the basis of the universe so einstein as much as he likes to believe in the determinist to universe comes up with the the theory that says the universe may not be that way. Even einstein never cracked the issue of determinism and free will. Certainly i am not going to be able to. Host einstein was not truly a relativist even though that is how he was interpreted by many including some whose disdain was tinge by antisemitism. Guest when he does the theory of relativity come as i said to the previous caller he believes in laws that determine things. It is not as if time is totally relative. He is saying that there is a relationship between time and motion. But that is the law that determines how time and motion go together. He is not saying everything is relative. He is saying there is a certain law that express in the equations of special and general relativity. What happens is people who look at the theory of relativity, especially as antisemitism is growing in germany, think it ties into a rut of is relativistic morality and the relativity of people who are doing art and plays and music, doing music where the old laws of autumnal cords are being broken and there is a resistance to modernity. We see that today. People who resist modernity whether it be in the muslim moral or in america who resist change and there is einstein saying that the fundamentals you have always believed in that time marches along, relativity. He wasnt a relativist. He believes in laws of nature but people who criticize him, he is saying everything is relative, we want certainty and that was part of the antisemitic backlash against what was called jewish science. Host where do you right . Host 18 i right at home and i right at night. I am somebody who from 9 00 p. M. To 1 or 2 00 a. M. When the phone is not going to ring and the iphone will not do a lot of alerts at the end things are going to pop up, i can be on my home office riding alone. I will not be one of those people who gets no sleep but one of the joys of the Aspen Institute is i convince people know great ideas happen before 9 00 a. M. And we shouldnt get in too early. There have been jobs like when i was at cnn when i had to be at 6 00 or 7 00 but i like to write at night, i like to sleep until 9 00. Host do you right on an apple product . Guest i use drop box which means when i am writing i put it in the cloud and you can use amazon or ibm, microsoft has a great Cloud Service too but i always use drop box so i can be on the train going to new york on my i had and fiddle with it. I get to my office in which we used telecommuters network in the office. I can call it up. On my iphone i can pull it up any device i want to. So i am not as wedded to hardware and one of the great joys is having Cloud Services were if we took a break, there was a computer run that side of the room and i wanted to call up something i was writing i could fool the up out of the drop box or whatever Cloud Service i use. Host do you worry about security in that way . Guest the security of the material . No. There are things i worry about, i worry about security, we got hacked at the Aspen Institute we want people to read our reports. Translating all of our reports will be good for them and good for us. On privacy and security, reading the first draft of one of my books doesnt keep me up at night. Host dennis in illinois. You are on the air. Caller i think cspan for this program, i thank the author because i read all of his books and enjoy all of them. Everything from why splint into his last book. The question i wanted to ask him is the kissinger book, with the release of the white house tapes and stuff from the nixon administration. Douglas brinkley was part of it. Has his ideals with looking at the tapes, a lot worse than what he was portrayed, from kissinger . Guest i have listened to a lot of those tapes. And i watched the new ones there is no fundamental totally different than we thought. The tapes really are revealing because they show private conversations where Henry Kissinger didnt know he was being taped so you see him sometimes cater to the darker side of Richard Nixons personality. Douglas brinkley did a great job editing some of those tapes and i am glad theyre coming out. I have a friend, evan thomas who we talked about the did the wise men with me who is writing a biography of nixon based on those new tapes. Those tapes are weird but for historians we are talking about these to have diaries and taped phone conversations and taped meetings, not to treasure trove for historians, and bears nothing that has come out since my book that fundamentally changes the book. Host 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 jets 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 any past president Henry Kissinger would be able by dint of his dedicated efforts and largerthanlife personality to retrain the trappings of grandeur long after he had left office. Guest Henry Kissinger spoke at a lunch at one of the great think tanks here and he is 92 years old and gave an overview of the world order and how it affected our relationships involving ukraine and russia. That was still as brilliant as any analysis you would want to see. He was in front of john mccains Armed Services Committee Earlier in the week giving testimony. She was at the alfalfa dinner last night so Henry Kissinger has by dint of just his ideas, his thoughts and his writing, and restrain the trappings of power, and that was 1977. It has been 38 years since he was last in government. Most people in the United States werent born probably since he was last in government. Bent yet he still somebody who as much as you may want to be appalled at the think tank does show how he is still a dominant part of our thinking and of our debate about how idealistic versus how realistic our Foreign Policy should be. I definitely respect that and as i said, the crises of the world, of the world order, Henry Kissinger wrote a book, diplomacy, many years ago, how world order happens, the treaty of versailles and he can still apply that intellectual framework to this area. Host what about the clintons . Guest Hillary Clinton will be running for president and bill clinton has that. When he comes to the Aspen Institute we have as we say people of both parties, even the republicans in our audience in aspen when bill clinton is there during his tour of the world and answering questions and remembering everybodys name and having read policy papers on how urban revival happens in older cities, or how micro payments helped women in india do something. He understands and knows more than anybody else and absolutely hypnotizing when he is giving a dissertation and so he has that definitely. Host california, thanks for holding on, you are on with Walter Isaacson. Caller i m 15 years old and before i ask my question i would like to say i am in favor of the da vinci book as well. It seems a lot of people my age dont get into biographies that much and i would like to ask you because the steve jobs book was my favorite of all time and i would like to ask how your writing sets you apart from others because yours seems to be the only one i can connect to in that genre. Guest give steve jobs credit. If you like that but it was because steve jobs was a truly interesting person and was able to be revealing in dealing with a biographer and i deserve credit for the fact the steve jobs biography is very interesting to you, but theres a larger issue which historians especially academic historians tend to downplay the role of biography. If you are a professor you write about the great forces of history. The beginning of my kissinger book but the epigraph is something that he wrote, he said on one of his Shuttle Missions to the middle east, Something Like when i was a professor at harvard i used to think history was made by great forces, but now i see the difference that individuals make. We biographers believe in the role of an individual to bent the forces of history of little bit. We also have to understand, this is why i wrote the innovators, sometimes we biographers distort history, make it seem like just one person sitting in the garage and having lightbulb moments and innovation happened when in fact it is great innovators and thinkers who know how to collaborate and formed teams. That is what i tried to do in my latest book but what sets me apart may be from academic other historians is i believe if you just tell the story of here is the beginning, here is the person, here is how he grew up in you listen to that person, Read Everything that person did and you 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 w goes into making history. Guest i never thought of that. Franklin gets in but the point is correct. I havent really thought about that. It is important and brave to get involved in electoral office, so many impediments to it. Something i never get and should have done and feel like okay if i could rewind the tape put yourself out there. Run for office, run for city council and people get to make a difference, Public Service is the noble calling and those of us in the press get difficult. Sometimes gets increasingly difficult to put yourself out there and be in Public Service and run for office and maybe after da vinci and leonardo and Louis Armstrong i will do somebody. Host if you were to write about an american president anyone pop to mind . Guest i love the bully pulpit by doris kerns goodwin, totally fascinating because he rises above party, he is a republican and Bull Moose Party but he is somebody who understands the importance of of believe pulpit of travelling across this country and saying he wanted a square deal. Almost like the time we are living in today. Daytime of prosperity a time of great technological change and that divide between rich and for making it harder for the middle class incomes of the square deal. And unlike some leaders today he says i am going to do it and go from 90 days on a train and talk in every single town about the malefactors of great wealth. The bankers jpmorgan, to say we have to have a square deal for the working present. So i will never surpass doris kerns goodwin. Wikipedia host william is calling from arkansas. Hi, william. Caller more comment than a question. I would appreciate it, if it has already been answered and discussed but i would like to thanks cspan for the wonderful presentation made available to all of us and the like to express my deepest appreciation to Walter Isaacson for presenting to us an accurate and determined portrayal of the less familiar may be neglected or forgotten characteristics of so many of our great people. One other comment i would like to make is i have a deep affinity for ben franklin. I had the good fortune as a you to work at a small country print shop that printed Community Weekly newspaper and old ban would have been right at home. I did the printing on all Washington Hand press. And became the operator of the press later. Guest you probably see the great connection of somebody like that who believes in the spread of information creates a postal system makes it open so i do admire that part of Benjamin Franklin that like me and you worked at a newspaper column above the the printing, loved the free flow of information and ideas. Guest host franklin has a resonance for a consummate network and an inventive curiosity. You would have felt at home and the information revolution and unabashed striving to be part of an upwardly mobile meritocracy made him and social critic david brookss face our founding yuppie. Guest was the resistance to franklin . He was ambitious. He was entrepreneur real. He was a pretty mobile. He was born of a working class candlemaker, become somebody who really wants to succeed and so there was that enthusiastic yet been s that i find appealing but i understand why people say too ambitious, too brash. Caller i am a big fan Walter Isaacson, thanks for taking my call. My question is if the powers that be came to you and said here is the key and i open up all of time for you who would you ask to talk to, being the most influential person at the top of the list for un the person at the very bottom of the list . Host who would be on the top of your list . Caller i like da vinci and at the bottom of the list i would like to talk to hitler. Guest i would love to talk to Leonardo Da Vinci about one thing that is still a mystery to me. He was the total genius but so much that he didnt complete. Paintings he didnt complete, designs for engineering that were never done. Is it because he had a passion for perfection . Is it because he was distracted . Is it because he didnt focus and tried to do so much or because once he had broken the code on something he didnt feel he needed to put the finishing touches on it . That is what i am working on as i read his notebook trying to get that question. Like the tie talk to Louis Armstrong i know everything about you, everything you did every day but i dont know whether you were happy, i dont know why you were smiling, i dont know what you felt about white people whatever. Sometimes i had that wonderful fortune to be able to do that with steve jobs and every now and then, a person who is a live like Henry Kissinger or steve jobs or when you get to talk to somebody and say i know everything about you but this is still a mystery and at least in the case of steve jobs, page after page is him trying to explain those mysteries. Host duane weeks and i hope Walter Isaacson writes books on rong would be a and Louis Armstrong, a great companion wikipedia a great book on armstrong. I still i dont know him but i think that has everything about Louis Armstrong in it. Isil find this the mystery. What was the cause of his happiness. I would also like to wrestle with the whole question of new orleans, the diversity and the knicks of people and i would say the tolerance but also the in tolerance. He is arrested on new years day, so it is not exactly ferguson but what is happening with kids on the street back then and now . What is happening when storyville opens . The sense of tolerance but also tolerance of sin. His mother was probably turned shall we say in parts of new orleans. So all of that gives you a sense of what is going through his mind and i would like to dry to deal with that. To me new orleans is such a fascinating place. Obviously it is fascinating in a complex way but a beautiful way. Is a city of masks. 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 him, who abandoned the family, didnt really know his father that well, in white face in a mask signifying in a strange way, playing all those symbols of race in the host hundreds. Throughout new orleans is a city of masks, you wear your mask and Louis Armstrong himself always wore a mask. Now what shakespeare teaches us growing up, henrik iv, we become the mask we were. That is an interesting topic to explore. Host two questions, did Albert Einstein failed math . A few years ago book came out, einsteins green. Guest when einstein died without much authority from the family, they take his brain, dont want to lose this thing, they put it in a jar of formaldehyde and keeps einsteins green and over the years you would parcel out pieces of einsteins brain but his people say i want to figure out why he was so smart. Theres a larger issue which is really interesting. You can look at this or that was slightly different tour this part. That gets back to alan turing. Are we just machines . You can find in the size of little parts of his brain the explanation for einsteins genius . I dont think so. I think we are not machines. We are humans. As much as they carve up the brain and slice it over the years trying to find the secret. I said earlier on, you have to look for natural explanations of things that that does not mean a drum microscope you confined genius by looking at the cells of a brain and know he never failed math. He was very good at math, almost as good as he needed to be. When he did general relativity he laments the fact that his math isnt a little bit better because tensor calculus is starting to stop him but he get some good friends to help him. He did fine in math but it is a good miss to have because he is doing a thing called uconn learn anything. I urge our viewers you cant learn anything. Uconn learn math you can learn relativity, you can learn about da vinci, and one of the videos about inspiring people that you cannot learn anything, einstein as a little baby in a bathtub, 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 . Guest most of it is in Princeton Hospital but it was sort of parceled out. Host was that of the injector to right . It is and i am using. Guest semi amusing and einsteins brain, the book you mentioned, an amusing book about it. It was fun to write partly because it got to the larger issue. Do we just look mechanically and try to figure out why he was a genius . No. You need the whole book, not just a microscope on his brain to say what made einstein into einstein. Host david, you are the last word today. Caller thank you for taking my call. I read a few of your books, the last week to books i read where the future of the mind and your the innovators. I read them because i saw you and him talking about them on booktv. A wonderful to have. I read a lot i read all nonfiction. I am correctly reading about be offered at gettysburg and one of my questions is to using sometimes as historians and people that read their works both understand and dont bother to look at the time that the person you are writing lives in or lived in a and therefore they are making assumptions about that person based on our point of view of today . Guest that historic fallacy has many names to it in which you impose the standards or ideas of today on a person. It is important for readers and historians to wrestle with that. An obvious example is when you are doing slavery and 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 the 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 churchill did not get on right side of history when it came that is the imposing a later judgment on them. You have to be aware of it. Last chapter of my Benjamin Franklin book was the most fun to write because it is about how every new generation discovers franklin a new and seasoned differently. In the age of great economic struggle, he is revered as the selfmade person. In a romantic period like the 1820s in 1830s people look down on him like d. H. Lawrence and others because he is not romantic and ethereal enough. In benjamin frankllin we see a reflection of our own time but we have to be aware that we as readers and historians are not looking at him in the context of his time but judging him in the larger context of history. Host does franklin deserve the accolade afforded by his great contemporary david hume of americas first philosopher . To some extent he does disentangling morality from theology was an important achievement of the enlightenment and franklin was its avatar in america. In addition by relating morality to everyday human consequences franklin laid the foundation for the most influential of americas home grown philosophies pragmatism. That is from Walter Isaacsons and American Life, benjamin frankllin. His first book came out in 1986 coauthored with evan thomas the wise men six and the world they made kissinger in 1992 benjamin frankllin 11 in 1993 einstein in 2007, steve jobs which is going to be made into a movie, 2011 and the innovators, howell group hackers, geniuses and peak created the digital revolution. You have been watching booktv on cspan2. This is our indepth program, Walter Isaacson has been our guest. Guest thank you. That is a lot of fun. Cspan created by americas Cable Companies 35 years ago and brought u. S. Public service by your local cable or satellite provider. Here is a look at some books being published this week. Former Campaign Manager and Senior Adviser to president Obama David Axelrod shares stories from his 40 years as a reporter and political consultant in believe. Nook for these tunnels in bookstores this coming weekend watch for the authors in the near future on both tv. Org. In the 20th century 3. 2 million americans died as a result of automobile accidents. Most of my students and most people i know have direct experience with an automobile accident. Thats not the same as military service, combat infection disease, etc. Its ubiquitous. And so that question is really what lies at the heart of the