audience laughter applause katy tur, welcome. Thanks for having me. So good to see you, congratulations on the book, its so great. Thank you i love this book, and the thing i love about it the most is that you had the good sense to write it, you were the earliest or among the earliest people on the Trump Campaign. You had the good sense to take notes, you figured out im gonna be witness to history, even if we didnt know whether hed get anywhere in this campaign. Yeah, i was there from the very beginning. Almost the very beginning. I was, the first rally i went to was june 30th of 2015, a few days after he announced his campaign. I was the First Network tv correspondent. Right, there were other people reporting on the Trump Campaign, but it was not something at the level or with the same commitment that maybe your network had made to placing you on the trail. No, we were the first ones to essentially take it seriously from almost the very beginning. We saw reporters come in and out, but
Were in a film called chappaquiddick . I thought, a comedy about chappaquiddick . audience laughing oh, right its not a comedy. No, its not a comedy. Its the actual chappaquiddick. Its a look at the story that really kind of affected ted kennedys life completely arguably changed history, right . If you believe the idea absolutely that ted kennedy was going to be president at some point, and this might have been the thing that disabled it, right . Oh yeah, beyond a doubt. And its also interesting given our current political climate, like what ted kennedy got away with, the entitlement and stuff like that. Its a really fascinating look. You and i are the same age, were both 51. 51, but i look 50. audience laughing is that right . You dont look a day over 50 and a half. I barely look 50 and six months. So we were three years old when this happened. So i have no memory of it, i just know what ive read over the years. And i suspect that when you were contemplating taking this role, and you
The thing that i take away from it is really the thing at the end, after you read the story and youre kind of contemplating the meaning of it all, here is this note from you, the author, a couple paragraphs explaining the genesis of the title. And its the Henry Longfellow translation of dantes inferno, which i gather, im not a scholar on dantes inferno, but i know that this is not the most popular translation, is that right . Right. And so you are citing this as the origin of the title, and it goes, if i can remember this, its midway upon the journey of our life, i found myself within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway had been lost. So look at that, i memorized that. Well done. Its a very elegant phrasing, and the concept of the forest dark obviously is yeah. You know, i find that translation particularly beautiful because it keeps the original order of the italian, so selva oscura, and you normally see that translated either as dark wood or dark forest. But theres somethi
Helen thorpe, welcome. Thank you so much. Im gonna pretend that we dont know each other. Stipulate, weve been friends for a long time, decades. 25 years, longer than that. And you know, the thing about this book, which made me cry, and i think is wonderful and is the best of your three books is, im overwhelmed with admiration for what youve accomplished here. Thank you so much. Its a great book and its a great book right now because of the world were in and the issues that are before us. And im trying to understand, even having read the book and having thought about what you must have been thinking about, how did you know that we would be having this conversation . I love that youre asking that question, because the world has changed so much in the course of just in that time. Yeah, while i was hanging out with these students. You started writing this book and researching this book, its the 201516 school year that is the guts of the reporting. Right, so to sort of bring us back to that
clapping and cheering Walter Isaacson, welcome. Thank you so much. Congratulations, another big success. Well, its great to be back with you, evan, thank you so much. And its a wonderful book, im moved to ask, although i think i know the answer, why him . You could write about anybody you could possibly imagine. And if you could write about anybody, why not leonardo . Id done books, starting with benjamin franklin, about really smart people, but i began to notice a pattern, which is, being smart doesnt count for much, you have to be creative and innovative. And first ben franklin, einstein, after doing that, i got to do steve jobs, and i realized that it was people who loved everything about the world, who loved art and science, beauty and engineering and technology. Those were the people who were the most creative, its like, here in austin, where you have a concentration of people who love both engineering and creativity and music, and the ultimate of that is leonardo, and i think the