Into the mind of Apple's iconic founder Steve Jobs in his 2011 biography he's also written bestselling biography. Franklin and Henry Kissinger his new book goes back in time to look at a different kind of creative genius Leonardo da Vinci a long time journalist and president of the Aspen Institute joins us to talk about the man who's flying machines when people still relied on horses and carts and envisioned a different kind of future is coming up next after this. Live from n.p.r. News in Washington I'm Lakshmi saying a motional testimony today from a former Navy seal at the sentencing hearing of Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl he's a soldier who walked away from his Afghanistan post and ended up being caught and held by the Taliban for 5 years N.P.R.'s Greg Myre he says retired Navy Senior Chief Petty Officer James Hatch was among a service member seriously wounded as they were searching for Bergdahl after he had band in his post that said he was the team leader and troops went in on 2 helicopters they began taking fire before their helicopters even landed when they got out of the helicopters they came under additional fire Hatch was shot just above his right need badly wounded he said he was screaming and had become useless and even a hazard to his fellow troops because his sounds were giving away their positions they also had a say a search dog with them that was shot and killed Hatch had to be met of act out of there he had 18 operations and has had to end his military career because of that N.P.R.'s Greg a prominent member of the media and leading intellectual Leon Wieseltier will not be launching his new magazine next week N.P.R.'s Lynn Neary says weasel tour has been dismissed because of accusations of sexual harassment Wieseltier began working on the new publication following his departure from The New Republic where he was a literary editor for several decades the new magazine was funded by the Emerson collective a nonprofit organization led by Steve Jobs widow Laurene Powell Jobs the collective decided to sever its ties with Wieseltier after receiving information about his quote inappropriate workplace conduct as charges mounted against Harvey Weinstein stories about weasel terror sexual behavior in the workplace began circulating and his name appeared on a widely reported anonymous list of men in the media who have behaved inappropriately with a tear has issued an apology for what he called past offenses against my colleagues Lynn Neary n.p.r. News Washington. Rock n roll pioneer Fats Domino has done his family says he passed away yesterday morning Eileen Fleming of member station has this remembrance Antwan bats domino it was a long time resident of the city's Lower 9th Ward staying in this neighborhood long after his career took off in the 1950 s. You. Read. Those piano fueled rhythm and blues hits included and that ashame walking to New Orleans and Blueberry Hill. 3 of. You 986 he was among the 1st inductees into the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame he stepped away from touring in the 1990 s. Preferring to cook for family and friends at its 9th Ward 2 story house he was there when Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005 he was rescued by boat and took shelter at the crowded Superdome he later settled in Harvey where he died for n.p.r. News I'm Eileen Fleming in New Orleans that stamina was 89 years old this is n.p.r. From k.q.e.d. News I'm penny Nelson the mother of a mentally ill inmate who died at the Santa Clara County Jail is suing the county she claims his death in 2015 was the result of neglect and excessive force k.q.e.d. Still a small reports Walter Moshe's died of sepsis from an untreated urinary tract infection and acute mania from an untreated mental illness the k.q.e.d. Investigation found that an alter cation with deputies likely exacerbated the condition that contributed to his death the medical examiner found that Roche's was catatonic when guards tried to move him to the psychiatric ward a few days before he died after he failed to follow their commands guard shot the man with pepper spray and plastic bullets the sheriff's department later banned the use of plastic bullets on inmates and restricted how and when deputies can use pepper spray on mentally ill inmates I'm Julie Small k.q.e.d. News sheriff spokeswoman says due to the pending litigation against the County the sheriff's office is. Able to provide comment on the case San Francisco grocery stores are now required to disclose the use of antibiotics in any meat they sell over use of antibiotics in meat is linked to the proliferation of bacteria that's resistant to treatment supervisor Jeff Sheehy introduced the right to no ordinance which was signed into law yesterday he says the measure specifically targets consumers consumers can drive the market and that's the way to do it provide consumers with information and then they can they can make their choices which will end up changing how many disparate just the proposal affects a large grocers in the city including Safeway c.v.s. And Whole Foods I'm penny Nelson k.q.e.d. New his support comes from 1440 Multiversity the science of connecting mind body and emotion for a student success conference January 12th through the 15th support for n.p.r. Comes from the ne e. Casey Foundation with 28 years of Kids Count data on the wellbeing of America's children providing access to national and local information as well as state rankings learn more a data center dot kids count dot org And by the listeners of k.q.e.d. Sunny skies around the Bay Area today with high temperatures this afternoon that are expected to range from the upper seventy's to the low ninety's well have northerly winds at about 5 miles per hour with San Francisco expected to top out at 79 degrees Oakland will have a high of 81 Sacramento reaching 86 San Jose will get up to 89 degrees welcome to forum I'm Michael Krasny Leonardo da Vinci may be known for painting Mona Lisas mysterious smile but he's also credited with some of the earliest drawings of flying machines and he envisioned a helicopter parachute and tank in the 15th century nearly 500 years before the 1st helicopter even took to the skies He's been called the original Renaissance man a creative genius and he's the subject of a new biography by Walter Isaacson Walter Isaacson has written biographies of Steve Jobs Albert Einstein Benjamin Franklin and he joins us to talk about. His new book on the painter and much more Leonardo da Vinci Welcome back to form it's good to be back at this wonderful room pleased to have you had this wonderful Romo which can give you Costa phobia one of my friends said recently but it is wonderful for all we like to think that we do here very expansive room. And you are expensive author I mean to take on a character and by the way I mentioned Walter Isaacson is also president and c.e.o. Of the Aspen Institute and was head of c.n.n. And was chief editor of Time magazine he's got quite a c.v. Himself but to take on a subject like Leonardo I mean despite all these other extraordinary biographies that you have produced and that have become a part of really our American canon there's there's just something about writing about someone whose mind was so capacious and who was so restless all the time with thinking of different things in a covered so much territory and was one of our greatest artists and one of our greatest scientists too I mean and I don't think you made much of a distinction between art and engineering getting back to Steve Jobs or the others I've written about it's those people whose mind can range across all right let me do a beautiful bird in flight let me figure out how birds fly let me do a note book on the flight of birds and then let me do flying machines he loved all these patterns in nature and the really cool thing was that his engineering and his art would just sort of ways of seeing the beauty of nature and you mentioned notebook but $7000.00 pages that really show again that wide unbelievable range of his mind which became an important source for you I know you also got a book from Steve Jobs up in Seattle with Bill Gates I mean Bill Gates I thought confused that there were these e l a Bill Gates bought the Codex Leicester which is one of Leonardo's notebooks probably the greatest of his scientific notebooks and it's glorious because it's everything from the measurement of the sun Dow shadows are formed. Into water to how fossils and how the waters get to the top of mountains and it's so important to understand the Codex Leicester because it's part of what Leonardo is doing while he's painting the Mona Lisa which is understanding not only everything there is the know about nature but also how do we fit into it and so almost the water is flowing into the back of Mona Lisa and that painting sort of spring sort of speak from the Kodaks Alastor and Bill Gates bought it a while back 1015 years ago and you know I had the chance like many people have because he's very generous to see the notebook and he's got a great curator and a great team that's working on translations of it and so they help me with my translations that I used in the book and help me understand the science and geology that's in that notebook and what I tried to do is tie it into everything else about Leonardo because when we make a distinction and we treat Leonardo mainly as an artist or mainly as an engineer we're making the mistake that he never made in his life which is to silence things well when he for example decided that he wanted to go from Tuscany to Milan and applied to Ludovico who was the essential ie the acting do it the ruler Yeah. Even the present of self largely as a military engineer was kind of an inflated resume of himself and just kind of mentioned at the end Well I can do paintings too it's a great as job application letter in history but it also has a wonderful window into the mind of Leonardo he had reached that unnerving milestone of turning 30 and so there he is having a really good looking guy not you know loving Florence but his father there is a notary and a couple of the paintings that Leonardo was supposed to do in Florence at his father and notarize a contract like the adoration of the magic he hasn't finished now. You know anybody would 20 something kids you know the problem when they kind of don't you know finish the things are supposed to do so Leonardo basically goes to Milan part of a delegation of cultural delegation soft power where the matter too you're sending musicians and playwrights and poets and artists Leonardo goes carrying a musical instrument as a musician but then writes a job application letter to the Duke and says in 11 paragraph letter and the 1st 10 paragraphs are I can build great public buildings I can make weapons of war I have engineering skills that allow me to do these types of machinery you know I know how to divert the course of rivers and he does his hydraulics engineering and only in the last paragraph number 11 he says I can also paint fault as well as any man and of course the car he goes on does the Last Supper but it shows 2 things about him one that he thinks of himself as an engineer and painter and doesn't make much of a distinction and secondly he does fantasize a bit and I thought well that's a bit uncool you know he's fat he's not really that good of an engineer especially at age 30 and yet then I realize it's the fantasy and this next of fantasy and reality that allows him to envision things like helicopters and flying machines that won't actually get made then but a very futuristic and we should do that not kid just let him fantasize a bit to Nick Caraway says at the end the Great Gatsby I turned 30 today I'm too old to lie to myself anymore that age of 30 was very different than ever and you know and you know I do still got to lie to himself in a way but that allowed him to stretch his imagination so thinking oh about how much you know keep emphasizing a sense non siloed world of engineering in art and how they were so connected in that world of Leonardo's but especially for him but going to Milan a law. Out him to do all the scenery and all the sort of stuff that really would become part of his paintings Yeah that's a very good point Michael is that most of what he did it early in his career was pageants plays sceneries props for the performances that were put on by the magic chib and then mainly the Duke of Milan is before t.v. And before the Internet is before movies so in the evenings what happens in the court of Milan is great debates are held on stage great performances of plays wonderful public spectacles and pageants and that was an important job to have just like Joseph Papp doing Shakespeare in the park you know but we don't remember that because it's not like the Mona Lisa we have a good record of it but in his notebooks I discover all these plays and pageants and even that helicopter you mention that but Gans as a prop for a play that he's choreographing and it's designed to take the angels down from heaven on to the stage but the fantasy he does for the theater then translates into the real world he says well let me try that in reality Likewise if you look at a stage production. It's very dramatic movement of the characters and the scenery comes in a perspective that and then you look at the Last Supper and say oh yeah look at the walls it almost looks like scenery accelerated perspective and the table is slanted as if it's on stage and the characters are making exaggerated gestures and you see the moment flowing of Christ saying one of you shall betray me and it flows out among the disciples so that theatrical production I discovered was immensely important to his imagination he does such a good job here Walter with the paintings I mean not only giving us a sense of. All the nuances and all that went into envisioning his paintings because most people are just familiar probably with the Last Supper and. Elisa and yet so nice paintings are just so extraordinary and they're in the book and I want to give something she's a real quick a shot because last eve jobs it's like Ok sometimes create a product that's more beautiful than necessary Simon and Schuster decided in doing this book to use heavy 80 what we call a the stock paper pure white with really good coding so the book's not that long it's you know less than 500 pages but it's heavy because these are full color illustrations throughout and that's cost $100.00 pages as a victim now they have well and I've had biographies and a longer but it it's full color pictures throughout so that when you're reading about say the baptism of Christ and seeing the rippling of the water by his ankles the pictures right there and they kept the price down to the price below that of most biographies now and I just want to give them credit because it was really good of them to make a book that was phenomenally beautiful with you know the color illustrations of the not all crammed on those glossy pages sometimes you have in the middle of the book where they cram 16 pages of pictures it's like every page has it and. I just appreciate a Pulitzer beautiful work and congratulations on that. And quite an extraordinary career you've had a survivor for we get to that I hope but you know there's something about having these paintings in the book that gives life to them and I mean especially with your giving life to Leonardo the way you do but I was also struck by the fact that so many paintings never were completed and you know the reality is. He was a guy who a lot of times just didn't get the job done because my I was going so many different directions and I think you probably had a falling out with his father on that it's like describing the book his father was a notary for some of these painting contracts and he doesn't finish the adoration of that John he would not have been. Notary if he was not illegitimate he might have been a notary if he was not an illegitimate scribe right he was lucky to be illegitimate his father grandfather great grandfather great great grandfather all notaries but being born out of wedlock meant that he couldn't inherit the family notary trade and also didn't go to university so he got to think across disciplines be a disciple of his own learning and experience and he was also left handed which was sort of sinister a you know it this is an essay and he was a vegetarian he was slightly a radical born out of wedlock game and so he was lucky he was born in Florence or born near Florence and moved to Florence because 1st of all it was an incredibly tolerance and it reminds me so much of San Francisco Florence in 1470 and San Francisco in 1970 had an explosion of you know free speech movement Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. The hippies but also the Homebrew Computer Club Likewise in Florence you have a new printing industry you have people being openly gay and you know. Feeling Fit right in oh I don't think you know me I mean that breaks down when you think Leonardo went to jail for sodomy Well he gets arrested for sodomy and may have spent a night in jail because there was a 2nd offense Fortunately among the people with him was one of the magic chief family members so he gets out right away and he never has a real problem being he has a boyfriend 1st I don't want to in my view already has a musician with whom he goes to Milan and then famously Sallai which is in a sticky fingers means the little devil because he kept nicking things and when they're all friends are getting together for dinner to do Vitruvian Man because that's done with some a group of friends that have visited via. Their satellite or who spills wine on the table so we. Yes a lot about I saw lying clearing a lot of drawings of Sol I Leonardo's notebooks and so Leonardo felt comfortable in fact. The word in German for gay in that period was floor ends or because some people from Florence was so tolerant of everything not just being gay but being different and we have to understand when you look at a city like San Francisco you look at a city like Florence 500 years earlier tolerance is a key part of getting people of different and diverse talents to rub together which is how creativity occurs we came to talk of our creativity became to Florence 15 o 2 and that was Caesar Borgia no less and Machiavelli place of you know a man if they're going to do a movie of this well that's the scene they wave and Leonardo Dicaprio I think has the rights he was a play Leonardo Well I know very little about Hollywood but I will say that the scene of the 3 of them Macchiavelli Caesar Bouygues and Leonardo working together for 4 months in the winter is I think that the No 2 and they're holed up in a tiny town called him Ola and Leonardo who's been doing you know thanks again be an engineer military weapons realizes that the best military weapon he can give is doing 3 dimensional looking maps with an aerial view but he's able to pace off this tiny town of Ramallah and do something that allows a military defender a great advantage if you have a perfect map of every building every street every stream and I once went to the Defense Mapping Agency and one near Washington when the maps look somewhat similar to what Leonardo did for Caesar abortion that went to her and Macchiavelli of course has taken the notes of enslaved rites the prince about boys yet. But Leonardo was a bit of a pacifist a vegetarian as we said right after 4 months he just throws it and he realized he says you should not be serving the war lord you saw a lot of terrible violence when he heard the capitated you know yeah yes it was it's odd I mean everybody has their psychological complexities and Leonardo very friendly as a pacifist would walk through the markets and see cage birds and buy them so that he could let them free and watch them fly so he's a gentle person of great friendliness and yet there's a little bit of a dark side swirling in him maybe search for the father figure where he decides to serve this warlord for a while until he gets fed up and quits and goes back to Florence So also in that same context or vein you write about all of the house we say controversy over whether to lave the statue of David naked or not you know he didn't get along well with Michael Angelo you can imagine Michelangelo 20 years younger sort of the new hot artist in Florence Leonardo was so friendly and had a lot of young artists around him we want to be nice to imagine what would have happened had they become friends but but Michelangelo was a very patchy lent reclusive and somewhat nasty person and he kept decimating you know Leonardo when they'd run into each other in the plazas of Florence So when Michelangelo does David with the huge statue Leonardo's on the committee to figure out where to place it and he votes to put it stashed away underwear now the arches of their feet say and to put a decent on him and on it I have in the book not only the beautiful statue of David but Leonardo's notebook drawing from the committee meeting we put a figure a fight over the genitals of David and that's the way they displayed it for the 1st 40 year or so it's interesting one of the. Cool things about writing biography is you realize these people are human and they do things like make mistakes and serve a warlord and then have to quit or they get into rivalries with Michelangelo or and we're not his case one of the notebook pages I love is in his thirty's after he's done this Duke of Milan thing in etc He has a recipe for dying his hair blond boiling knots an oil because he has he's beautiful blond corals he's a self-portrait in Vitruvian Man that beautiful body and curling hair but you get a sense of his own insecurities and feelings talk a bit more though about where the creativity comes from in your judgment because a lot obviously it's allied with your belief and we suppose we have 2 cultures accordionist Oliva's of you know Martin and science and so forth but the reality is you see them not only converging in his mind but this great curiosity that he has a worse a tie in to cure to creativity his creativity emerge from that I think being self taught gave him Lesson number one in creativity which is be curious always be curious for curiosity's sake one of the things on his to do less besides magic to figure out how to measure the size of the sun why is the sky blue why do people yawn or which muscles move the lips he writes of these to do lists of things he wants to know one of them is describe the tongue of the what Packer and go What why would somebody wake up one morning and want to know how would you find out but it was out of pure curiosity that he did these things so Lesson one is pure curiosity which I think partly comes from be just a curious kid but it partly comes from not having gone to school or formal schooling so he has to be self-taught secondly is Be observant which connects to that and my last chapter of my book I do 20 of these lessons the lesson to is be observant because he'll say go down to the moat by the castle and look at the forming dragon flies to see if their wings alternate when it flies or their. In unison and that's something any of us could do but you and I when we see a dragon fly probably don't pause to observe it carefully and that's lesson 2 on how to be creative is observe things that we quit observing after we outgrow our Wonder Years at age 10 or 12 and all the way through but the main lesson as you said is be open to the beauties of all fields whether it's math or music like Leonardo most isn't art or engineering I was the same maybe regulatory about public education in this sense there was always this belief that Shakespeare couldn't have written Shakespeare it had to be Marlowe or King John or so they've been correct Oh of course but he was too plebeian or something good you know when you think about just the underprivileged nature of Leonardo in terms of his education and so forth it all really came out of his out of didacticism right to tell us totally self taught and he so lucky because just as if he had been born 500 years later in San Francisco when the Internet was coming up he's born just as good in Burke's printing press is starting to spread so among the lists in his notebooks Besides you know describe the tongue of the woodpecker or why do people yawn Are you find the translation of Euclid that that the stationer's next to the bridge you know find the true Vss 10 books of architecture that are you know available in public and so he's finding these wonderful books and just seeking out knowledge for its own sake. Talking if you just joined us with Walter Isaacson who delves into the mind of another genius this time it's Leonardo da Vinci did you go from jobs to defense unit kind of natural organic way you know one of the things that Leonardo so good at spotting patterns you know he'll walk through and see a whirlwind of air and a coral of hair and. Water flowing into a bowl you know say those spirals have the same pattern Hill even do a stab at the foot Binoche he equation or whatever the math behind it it took me a while to figure out the pattern I had done Benjamin Franklin another autodidact never went to college had to teach himself who loved every field from flying a kite to figure out what electricity is to publishing Poor Richard's Almanac and being a journalist and after doing Franklin and then I saw he was a great you know love music and played Mozart whenever he was stymied but in Quezon of general relativity and then Steve Jobs who as you know at the end of every product presentation would show street signs of the intersection of art and technology I eventually I'm not as smart as our women are no figured out the pattern which is I love minds that cross different disciplines and not help and that ability to love both math and music like Ada Lovelace love both poetry and processors have to fetch a pretty exceptional mind though to get in the minds of these people especially Einstein jobs and Leonardo we're talking to Walter Isaacson He also wrote of our affiliate Kissinger and. Welcome your involvement in the program thoughts about creativity about genius about Leonardo your questions and comments are welcome and let me tell you how you can join the program are toll free numbers available by the way Walter of be at Kepler seceding in Menlo Park at $730.00 he's also c.e.o. Of the Aspen Institute and former chair of c.n.n. And former managing editor of Time magazine joined us at our toll free number it's 866-733-6786 we welcome your calls your questions your comments again the number to call 866-733-6786 You can also join us by e-mailing us forum at k.q.e.d. Dot org or going right to our website www. Dot org slash forum or tweeting us or Twitter handles at k.q.e.d. Forum or go to our Facebook page with feel free to join the program on the conversation on Michael Christie. Coming up tomorrow on Forum 4 years ago a high school student set fire to the skirt of an agent or student asleep on a bus in Oakland. Slater joins us to talk about her book The 57 bus the true story of 2 teenagers and the crime the changed their lives and for putting together a special show focusing on those who died in the northern California wildfires did you lose a family member or a friend or loved one well we'd like to hear your memories and tributes You can e-mail them to us. Or that's. Or thank you. Support for k.q.e.d. Comes from Half Price Books offering book lovers a broad selection of titles including new releases bestsellers collectibles even textbooks more at neighborhood stores or online at h b b dot com and buy with Saudi with Saudi as next generation cloud storage for a broad range of applications including archives videos General Mixon more learn more it was sabi dot com. And Jeremy Hobson In 2012 Kansas introduced one of the most watched economic experiments in the country with cutting taxes boost growth within a year Kansas had an answer revenues dropped on the order of 602700 1000000 dollars Look at what went wrong as we broadcast from Kansas City That's next on one here and. Stay with us for the here and now program it will be along right after forum beginning at 11 o'clock this morning here on k.q.e.d. This is forum I'm Michael Krasny We're talking with Walter Isaacson who has written a biography of the true Spencer in man. Leonardo da Vinci and certainly welcome your involvement in the program number of ways to join us by e-mail by going to our website or by calling us or toll free number again is 866-733-6786 we talk a little bit about the Mona Lisa because as you point on the book. This is probably done for a wake of a wave of a soap marchin but he at the time could have done. For the richest person Isabella Deseret the richest woman in Italy is begging and begging and begging and saying I'll pay anything to my portrait and he didn't dance to the music of patrons who decided that Lisa the wife of a cloth merchant had a certain mysterious beauty and decided to take that commission and of course never delivered it because he takes a commission 1503 in 1519 when he dies it's by his bed. Inside in France because he's always thinking there isn't one more stroke I can add that will make that smile more perfect in fact the fascination and hopelessness Miles comes across to for you you know he just sacks the human face to get every muscle that touches a weapon including figured out that the bottom lip is a muscle but the top lip can't move independently and and how the nerves all go he also desex a human eye to figure out if you see something directly at the center of your cornea cornea retina. You see the details but in if you are looking slightly from an angle you see colors and shadows so he makes the Mona Lisa Smile if you look directly at it some of the details make it looks like she's not really smiling but as your eye wanders to her cheek or Chen or forehead the smile pops on so it's augmented reality it's interactive and it's a looser It's a smile the more you look for it the less you see it so these people who say he wasted time doing optics and deceptions and everything else I say now the Mona Lisa answers that criticism with her smile. There's a local and our show is broadcast throughout the country and actually we have listeners on line across the Atlantic and so forth but local Actually a friend of my lunch line did have our a feel right they did that wonderful learning from what you can learn from me how the mind works which is Central so did a book called art and physics so again you know there's that juxtaposition of that connection between the 2 and I think a lie you know author Miller out of London has also done art and physics books and stuff I think that if you appreciate Einstein you appreciate Leonardo even Benjamin Franklin who was not a genius in the way that an Einstein or Leonardo was but he just loved the connection of science and humanities. It's a wonderful wonderful way of looking at the world I wonder though and I want to get back to Leonardo who when I read Einstein and we talked about it I thought. You know there's an old saying if you understand quantum mechanics you'd have to be crazy or a genius and yet. You were able to understand quite know I will I think I got General Relativity and special relativity I think it was Richard Fineman said nobody understands quantum mechanics and deserts because even Einstein on his death that. Couldn't fathom this notion that in a quantum mechanical world things happen not according to strict causation laws but they happen by chance by probability of the subatomic level and he famously keeps saying I cannot believe that God plays dice with the universe on his death that he still writing equations that are trying to get a unified theory that will bring together the mysteries of quantum mechanics with the certainties of the laws that define general relativity unified field theory yes and you know what I mean if I made make a diversion here one of things that inspired me was looking. Those last pages of Einstein as he's dying in Princeton I don't went to Hebrew University to go look at the originals and he still even knows he's dying Zen and they order that ruptured and I can operate he's still writing until the pain makes it too great he dribbles off line after line of equations to get the unified theory as if he could get us one step closer to the spirit manifest in the laws of the universe as he was dying when Leonardo is very old and in France and his heart is failing he had a puzzle that his whole life he had tried to deal with you can see it reflected in Vitruvian Man and see an ancient puzzle of trying to square the circle to make a circle the exact same size as a square the same area using only a world in upper tractor I mean a and yapper tractor and. His last notebook page from France there's 4 more drawings right triangles some trick Euclid had tried to use varying the lengths of the legs of the triangle and has all chart and then as he gets near the end of the page just where Einstein lists 2 thirds of the way down the page it breaks off and he says but the soup is getting cold and you imagine that he's been called downstairs by his cock mattering his students and colleagues are all waiting for him to eat the midday meal and he's still trying to square the circle even though he's dying but the soup is getting cold lovely story hour at our callers and you know it's quick thing though Mr when I think about on some particularly now. Prophetic the Vinci prophetic he would say in some ways certainly Kissinger and see jobs were prophetic I mean there is that element of the visionary quality to have to be visionary him let's let's bring in our listeners and let me begin with. Phil Phil you're up good morning good morning great show you know an avenue of trees the power of the independent thinkers have problems for example. Galileo when he confirmed the Copernican theory that earth rotates around the sun but convicted by Roman Inquisition and then when he published the 2nd proving. He was convicted of 2nd crime and then confined to his home so I'd be very curious to hear you know how the environment independent thinkers Yes and they do have to speak truth to power and more importantly they have to question received wisdom I mean whether it's Steve Jobs saying here's to the misfits the rebels around pegs in the square hole those who think different to Einstein who's looking in the 1st paragraph of Newton's print kept the which tells us that time marches along irrespective of how we observe it and I'm saying how do we know that let me question that Leonardo is very very good at that it comes from the fact that he self-taught in a disciple of experience I knew many examples I'll give you 2 or 3 which is you know the story of the biblical flood taught by the church he studies fossils he looks at layer and layer of sediment and fossils in it he even discovers the 1st to discover trace fossils which means not the fossil of an organism but of the trace of the organism left so he knows it was alive when that trace was made and even paints an inversion of the rocks beautifully so he writes in his notebooks and says no the biblical flood did not have. And it didn't work that way these things were over thousands of years like why he does the fetus in the womb the uniform beautiful drawing which is the frontispiece of my book and he says oh but it's viable it's not viable out of the womb because it's getting nutrition and it's not breathing on its own and questions you know when viability occurs in the womb. There's so many things where he questions the teachings of the church and fortunately for him at that period. Let us say the church is not. Overly strict we talked about Caesar Borgia he's the son of a pope now you think about it for a minute how do popes you know is supposed to be celibate so it was a time when there were a lot of matter and boys those who were popes and so there was it's why the Reformation is starting to happen and because the church isn't all that strict and Leonardo gets to resist to some extent the teachings of the charge while still learning the teachings of the church I mean bring on more collars for our guest Walter Isaacson whose new book is Leonardo da Vinci and let me go to a few comments from listeners so whenever we have a biography of a genius what comes up is who they borrow from or what are they borrowed And so how originally are there and how much how collegial were they in terms of partnerships or working with teams and so forth I've got those 2 listeners who address both of those points let me just read what they write Ben writes I read somewhere that the Vinci had many educated people working under him does not mean his genius might be owed to his very talented disciples and Jeff writes Just a couple of months ago there was a documentary on I believe p.b.s. Which characterized events he has a great bar or the ideas of others just curious as to the guess comments both very absolutely right in Leonardo would be the 1st to say so he was the most collegial of all you know. Genius as of the time he gets he loved working in the court of Milan his best friend is Lugo patio lathe a mathematician and they do you know shapes together Leonardo does a drawing but he's always asking in his notebooks he'll say Look up patchily taught me how to do cube roots and roots and then he'll have a friend who's an astronomer teaches the measure of the sun he very much annotates even the books he reads in the ideas he get the weapons of war done from the outrageous and some other people whose books he bought and that's one of the things I learned over the years in writing about geniuses is we biographers have a dirty secret which is we distort history sometimes by making it seem like genius or creativity is a guy or gal going to a garage or garrote all alone in a lightbulb moment happen now even at Apple it wasn't just Steve Jobs it was a team certainly if you look at all the great things in the Bay Area from Intel to Google or whatever it's teams of people who do it Leonardo loved putting together groups of people I have a whole chapter on how the true Vian man for example the guy in the circle and square was done with 4 friends who were working on the Milan Cathedral then they go to pot Via to make a more simple church they read Vitruvius has 10 books on architecture they each draw the man and the proportions of man compared to a church and Leonardo of course does the memorable of all the drawings but this he knew that creativity was a team sport Well this is a team program we're going to hear from our listeners let me get Paul on next Paul welcome you're on the air. Thank you for taking my call and for the. Local sculptor a couple questions. Sir from I am not a native speaker so these are not formally questions 1st or Winston and this concept. Of solid. Perhaps the 2nd on the arm for all of the call part involvement and absorbing knowledge because I'm the reason I ask. Of Us is why I'm a sculptor because I think it's very important we're cite something a lot of this is because of technology I'm not against technology that's the all that should mean it's so explicit so perhaps some answers I really appreciate it solitude Leonardo wrote about it in a romantic way he did a treatise on how to be a great artist and creator and he says sometimes you need solitude she'd go off into the countryside and be alone like a lot of the advice that Leonardo gave he didn't actually believe it that deeply he was somebody who very rarely sought out solitude occasionally go to the countryside outside of Milan to visit the family of his companion melting but he more enjoyed working around a lot of people of different and diverse talents and there are other parts of his notebook where he says you have to surround yourself with creative people because that's where great ideas happen in terms of the physical nature of things Leonardo was quite comfortable with technology and he was always building machines you see him as one of the sum of all technologists really don't write any especially on mechanics I mean we don't have electronics obviously back then but he loved mechanical devices that would do everything from Fly to make gain jewels and a theater performance fly when he was a young kid just like in his you know 12 or 13 years old invoke you know studio he did the tech work on the technology to solder using mirrors that concentrated the sun's light rays a copper ball to. Put on top of the dome of Florence's Cathedral the dormouse that burn Alaska design the dome and that was about the copper ball on top so Leonardo drugs all the machinery and 30 years later in his notebooks he still saying Remember how we did the mirrors that were able to solder the ball on the Dome of the cathedral speaking of technology I'd like to get your thoughts about something and it ties in with my question before about being prophetic in visionary I mean even in these great minds and you've lived their lives and. When I interviewed Ray Kurzweil is now at him and he was talking about Leonardo and he was saying you know who you are not a vision I was flying at the time who would have thought 740 seven's and so forth any sort of attach that to the idea that we would never conceive of immortality but now of course we can and it brings me right to something else that I want to because I know you've been concerned about this and so is he on mosques artificial intelligence I mean it's a great concern to Musk He says it's more concerned in the North Korea or Iran or anything like that yeah I there are 2 schools of thought when it comes to artificial intelligence one tribute to Ada Lovelace who in the $830.00 s. And forty's Lord Byron's daughter who puts together the notion. Of it and she is great and she loves both poetry like her dad and processors and math like her mother and she says we'll be able to build machines that will be general purpose because she looked at the punch cards are using for the looms and she said they'll be able to do everything except think it'll be humans it'll be creative in the machines that will be the processing power then you have Alan Turing exactly 100 years later from when I published a paper calling it Lady Lovelace's objection and sang with the imitation gang Now machine to be able to think just like humans we won't be able to tell them apart. So the 2 schools of thought diverge which is what I'll call the Ada Lovelace Doug Engelbart Alan Kay Steve Jobs school which is the combination of humans and machines will always outpace humans alone and machines alone and what they can do and so if you have assembly Elsa's a partnership of humans a machine you'll be able to move faster and do more than what machines alone will be able to do and the other school is sort of the Alan Turing. Singularity school which is now at a certain point machines will leave us behind and not need us I tend to look at the data because I'm a historian not a Futurist and say and every step of the way from 830 to now. Steve Jobs has been correct that the partnership of humans and machines ends up being more productive and more creative than the machines. That outpaces it and will continue to do so and we'll continue to take more your calls when we go next to Mike Mike you're on the air. Thank. You don't remember me but you're not Committee at Time Inc to launch Pathfinder to tell all my goodness. From the early days of the Internet. Their creation. Your work. Your biography looking forward to reading this one curious about one thing we already mentioned earlier in the program. And how it how it. Sort of. Mix or match. Time I've heard a rumor that he had deliberately inserted certain into a design for these war machines such that in an era before patenting and. Free copying they would actually be affected. If you find your research. Yes there is some truth to that and. Let's take that tank that's somewhat famous looks like a turtle. And it's has people inside and guns pointing out words in a big old shell of a tank and it was considered to be the invention of the 1st time and Leonardo being Leonardo does all sorts of layered drawings so you see each mechanism and how the mechanisms work and one of the gears in cards is reversed so that if you build to the exact way he drew it one of the wheels would time the wrong way and the whole thing would work. Some who say he did that it was just a mistake. I'm not sure Leonardo made mistakes like that he knew how gears and cards work others say he did it so nobody could steal 100 build it and be affective and that's the joy of Leonardo is discovering tiny little things like that that you know were intentional and he probably wanted to make sure that at least without his permission nobody could build one of those things same with his underwater diving gear which he thought would be a very dangerous weapon and he made it so that he didn't show all the details now reminds me of can you say something about the way he wrote because there was a lot of controversy he wrote in mirror scrap meaning he instead of from the left hand part of the page of the right hand part he wrote from right to left with the all the letters were versed and that's because while people thought was a code or so yeah and I think it's mainly because he's left handed and you don't smear the ink if you're using your left hand and you go from the right part of the page to the left part of the page and he does that even as a kid because he's an unusual person which is he's not schooled but he has literate and so he writes the way he wants to because he wasn't taught to write with perfect penmanship it also means that people can look over and show as shoulder and see exactly what he said but it was not really a code because if you tried you could easily break the code you just held a mirror up to it or you can I've looked obviously looked at a lot of the notebooks and if you work at it you can read it backwards and speaking as being literate in those notebooks There's also a lot of parables and rhymes and all kinds of known literary poetry stories I think a lot of what he did was for the theater that was his main job in his twenty's and early thirty's and they put on performances at the court and some of them are play some amount of stories of people to claim and even that helicopter starts off as I said is a prop. 1st stage performance of bring the angels down from the rafters so people sometimes mystified about what's this weird story in his notebook and I'm sure it was some for some grand evening performance at the Duke of Milans court. Let me go to more of our callers and let's go next to Bill you're on the air Good morning. Good morning and thank you for taking my call went out wonderful to have authorized accident at this conversation and what an important topic I run the Fed He Institute here in Mountain View and now we have 75000 just whose work is to investigate the origins of life in the universe and it's a multitude disciplinary task in addition to the fight that we have an artist in residence program which I'm so proud of and pleased of and I'd be interested to you know it's a little bit like conciliate this convergence of art and science interested in Walter's perspectives on how we build that awareness of the importance of that intersection in the technical community in particular here in Silicon Valley but also more broadly we find that our artists are very often in spending time with our scientists and interpretive network give our fight this different perspective that they've never before realized about the work that you know I think would you do is so important in that regard and. Indeed so many great technologists have you know benefited whether for mind scientists Steve Jobs from the connection to art but I'm going to actually flip your question the other way because most technologists and most engineers and most scientists I know they actually like art they have an appreciation for music for beauty they even go to Shakespeare plays or whatever the problem is sometimes they are on the other side is that my friends who tell me Oh it's so important for all these engineers to know Art I say Yeah but you love the humanities in art do you know what a transistor does do you know what an on off switch does in a circuit and how Boolean algebra can make a logical sequence do you understand what a mathematical equation how to visualize it and they go oh I don't do math I don't understand physics I don't like science in a some contempt about how can they hold rag they never brag that they. Couldn't know the difference between Hamlet and Macbeth but if they would sort of joke that they don't know the difference between you know a resistor and a capacitor they don't know the difference between a differential in a. Quasar in an algebraic or formula and you think alright maybe instead of fighting to get the a into stem so that you can have all arts with science education you should fight with those in your side the humanists and the artists to say we should appreciate the beauty of science a bit more that's what I learned from Ben Franklin and that's what I learned from Leonardo well for a number of years as my listeners know I was involved in a science humanities convergence program that was funded by n.e.h. And the Mellon foundation and what we try to do is and I would make a sort of a little bit of a homily hair get artists and scientists together that's what we did you know getting to talking about subjects of comments on oh now you've got Gene editing you've got all kinds of things along those lines that they can actually discuss and discuss from their different perspectives and learn from each other and exactly where creativity occurs is when there's that intersection and people worry about our jobs of the future and so they tell our kids as I my daughter majored in computer science that they have to learn coding and. That's true I mean people who are here Minutes who tell me oh they should learn Latin and Greek and say that's fine but do you know Pascal or Python you should understand those languages as well however if you just know the engineering I think you might be left behind because it is that partnership in some b.o.c. Us of creativity and technology that's what Steve Jobs and Leonardo da Vinci and they to Lovelace taught us is where real innovation of course is a question that you probably get a lot and is in some ways an unfair question to say who's your grade b. . Who's your greatest interview you know those kinds of things it's almost impossible but when you talk about genius and we've been talking about genius I mean is it who said top your pantheon is Leonardo above Einstein and jobs or is yeah Leonardo is sort of the culmination of these books I've been doing and I don't think I'll try to scale another mountain like this because Leonardo is the ultimate in connecting art and science the trivia in man is the icon of that and the cool thing about him is that he wasn't touched by lightning the way Einstein or Newton was and have some processing power that we're never going to fathom he did it by being self taught by being observant by being curious by being open to Mystery by blurring the line between fantasy and reality all those things we can do if we allow ourselves to be more childlike and curious and observant and so he's the one I had the most fun with and to me he's the person I've been building up to in my whole career as a whole to just say you know let's let's do a Leonardo De venture so no more months to climb I think all right some of the definitely moving to New Orleans my hometown moving back home I've always had a home there actually and I'm going to do some bad racing class and jazz and music but. This Leonardo da Vinci book I you know to me the beauty of the book the way it's been printed the way I try to bring together the science and the art I think I'm going to leave that as the. Culmination Well I hope you will write more and be back with us again I hope I can come back even if I write a small small book you'll always be welcome Walter Walter Isaacson again c.e.o. Of the Aspen Institute and also the author of biographies of Steve Jobs Benjamin Franklin Henry Kissinger and now Leonardo da Vinci and he'll be at Kepler's this evening you can actually meet him there and be there at $730.00 in Menlo Park and we're here with you Monday through Friday 9 to 11 an hour repeated 10 to 11 Anything you can of course continue this discussion online by going to q.e.d. Dot org slash forum thank you for being a part of this morning's program if all goes according to plan will be back with you on the morrow and for all of us here at k.q.e.d. I'm Michael Krasny. 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