my first day as a journalist in the times picayune of new orleans when i was about 17 and we had a summer job i went and somebody had a young woman a young girl had been killed and i went out and i was supposed to find out about it and when i called the story back in as the days before email i
had to go to a pay phone if you remember what that was and phone it back to the office my editor said what happened when you interviewed the parents so i didn't go bother the parents and he said go knock on the door and interview the parents so i took a deep breath and i did it and i learned my first lesson
which is people like to talk and they like to talk about themselves and what happened and they especially like to talk if you like to listen if you're not trying to guide the talk you're not trying to explain things to them and so i just said tell me about it and they did and so ever since then i
realized i can call up anybody and they usually want to talk especially about themselves because they usually find themselves very interesting and if i just listen they'll keep talking and if sometimes they don't answer my question if i don't follow up right away i just
stay there and listen and i'm silent they got to feel this fill the silence and they talk [Music] walter i'm so glad to get to talk to you today it's my pleasure great to be with you shane let's start at the beginning you started writing about ben franklin and then einstein and then steve jobs
and then davinci what made these lives worth exploring you know when i worked at time magazine or was growing up i knew a lot of smart people and it suddenly occurred to me that smart people are a dime a dozen they don't usually amount to much the real key was
being creative to be able as steve jobs would say to think different and to be innovative and so i started looking in for what are the clues to creativity and innovation and whether it's leonardo da vinci or ben franklin or steve jobs these are people who love to see patterns across nature they were
interested in everything you could possibly know and by seeing those patterns they made mental leaps that others didn't do and so i've never been interested in powerful people necessarily or poets or soldiers i've been interested in creative thinkers what's your method for studying people
and telling a story about them you know it's pretty simple it's chronological you begin at the beginning and a lot of historians they don't believe in narrative or chronology but i grew up in louisiana and i had a mentor here who said the two types of people come out of louisiana preachers and
storytellers he said for heaven's sake be a storyteller it's the way the bible does it you start with the great lead sentence in the beginning comma and you make it a chronolog a chronological narrative and so all of my books use that as a guiding principle because that's the way we lead our lives that's
the way we learn things that's the way we uh develop our character is step by step day by day one of the things that you do that struck me as surprising is that you print everything out at the end of the night and then you review it in the morning we know things look
different on paper than they do on the screen and when you see it on paper in the next morning you're able to find those sentences or those phrases that don't quite track or that read kind of clunkily you see where the whole thing is kludgy in parts and so i love reading something on a screen then i
love reading it on paper and then i love reading it aloud let's explore steve jobs for a moment jobs early mentor mike markula wrote him a memo in 1979 that urged three principles the first two were empathy and focus but the third was an awkward word impute but you said it became one of job's key
doctrines what does impute mean and how did it play in it was definitely an awkward word but impute means what does something signal when you first see it what does it imply and you know i remember getting my first ipod you know a thousand songs in my pocket that's going to be great and as
you open the box it opens up as almost as if it's a tiffany jewel box and their cradled in it is this wonderful object of desire your first ipod and it kind of imputes things it it doesn't just say here you know cut open the cellophane here it just has something magical and even
when steve jobs did the original macintosh he made it so that the boxes that they delivered him in the boxes that you got your mac in had four color and the people there were saying wait that's real expensive to make boxes for color he said yes but we need to impute we need to impute the
fact that this is going to be an object of delight i think we still under appreciate that yeah i mean you look at all sorts of junky things in our lives from our tv remote controls to the packaging on our products to the way perhaps our computer screens uh now work you look at uh i
don't know microsoft teams it like says it imputes uh this is going to be a horrible experience uh i'm not user friendly with you so i think that you know we need to see life through the eyes of steve jobs more often and say what is this signaling to me how can i make it more user-friendly it's quite a
contrast from an efficient hyper-focused world where profits come before products but i think one of the keys to jobs is understanding that products came before profit he said if you make a real if you really focus on making profit you're going to cut corners you're going to do
things you'll juice up your revenues you'll cut your costs a little bit you'll make a profit but that way is a path to disaster he said if you focus on making a really insanely good product the profits are going to follow well your book on jobs is a biography so many people use it as a manual to
achieve something great what are some of the lessons that we can learn from jobs well i say that we biographers don't write how-to books i didn't write ben franklin to say how to be a diplomat or a leader or a how-to book uh with steve jobs saying how to run a company or for
that matter jennifer dowden my latest hero of my books you know these aren't seven secrets to success or seven easy lessons for how to run a company in fact when people would come up to me and they'd say i used your steve jobs book like elizabeth holmes would the person who uh invented uh theranose or launched
theranos say oh i use your steve jobs as a how-to book i'd go no no no it's not a how-to book don't try this at home first of all there's only one steve jobs there's only one leonardo da vinci you've got to study a whole lot of lives you've got to figure out what's most comfortable for you and how you manage
people how you deal with people what are your goals what are your mission and that comes not from reading the 12 lessons to this or the you know 10 secrets to that it comes from looking at other people saying what makes them successful what makes them easy to deal with what
type of attributes do they have that you aren't going to have i mean even if i wanted to be a successful steve jobs i would never have all those attributes so i got to play with the cards that have been dealt with me and play to my own strengths and that's what i try to do in my books is i say i'm telling you about
real people here people made a flesh and blood if you want to learn the lessons without understanding the people good luck to you but that's not the way i teach it jobs is famous for his intensity where did that come from and how did he manage to avoid complacency well he had a real
focus to him he cared he had a passion that passion was obsessive i see it in a lot of people i've written about there was a playful and obsessive passion in leonardo da vinci he just wanted to understand everything he could possibly know about all things knowable when he's
doing the mona lisa he's dissecting the human eye to see how light rays hit different parts of the retina he's dissecting the muscles and nerves that touch the lips to see whether a muscle that moves the lips also moves the eyebrow those type of things these type of people who realize that
god is in the details those are the people who make great advances and i put leonardo in that category i put ben franklin steve jobs in that category jennifer doudna as she's trying to understand the inner workings of molecules and realizes that the structure of a molecule the structure of a piece
of guide rna the way it twists and folds determines how it becomes a key to unlock the mysteries of life that type of passion about the details is to me one of the keys to creativity i think you just gave a great preview of the rest of this episode i want to get into all those people but before we get
there i still want to continue on the threat of steve jobs a little bit because we're talking about sort of the pursuit of perfection and the small details and jobs was worried about things that nobody would ever see like how it was laid out on the micro board and what was behind the screen that
nobody would ever look at how did that help him and how do you think that hurt him when steve was young he and his father built a fence around the backyard in their house and a little town in california and his father said to the young steve jobs we're going to make the
back of the fence just as beautiful as the front of the fence and steve said why nobody's ever going to see it it's facing scrub land nobody's ever going to know and his father said yes but you will know and the lesson steve jobs took from that is that you if you care about beauty you care
even about the beauty of the parts unseen and so steve whether it was the circuit board on the original macintosh or the various types of ways that the chips were lined up he wanted to make sure that the beauty of the parts unseen showed that you were a real artist his father said if you're making a cabinet
that and the back of it faces the wall you still use a good piece of wood facing the wall because that's how you know you're a real artist so when steve jobs and his small team did the original macintosh the case was sealed you couldn't open it up you couldn't see the circuit board
and yet he decided to make it beautiful and he asked the 30 engineers on the team to sign their names onto a white board that they engraved on the inside of the case where nobody would ever see it nobody would ever know but their signatures were on the inside of the case that made them into real artists
there's something very poetic about that what moments did you have where you were like wow i had no idea when you were researching steve oh i think that the details of design i remember walking around the design studio with him and johnny ive and they were working on
electrical plugs for european outlets and there were about seven different um proposals or shapes or you know prototypes that they could use and steve was fondling each one talking about the chamfers which is the way uh peace and uh talking about how it would feel in your hand how it would delight people
now i must admit if you ask me about my mac and you know uh how it plugged in i don't know that i even know what the plug that plugs into the wall exactly how it's curved exactly how it's shaped but when after steve did that i realized that you have to really care and be passionate about the beauty of
design and that the design includes the hidden things the design includes the small things it includes the details and so i've always tried to be a little bit more aware of why say a plug for one of piece of equipment is so much cooler than a plug for another piece and what
that says about the people who made that product was there anything you felt you needed to censor or you felt conflicted about writing a bit yeah my wife read the book and i read a lot of the book to steve and there were things when steve was um you know in his last year or so
where at times he would be angry he was sick and so i took out things uh i used a calibration in a way which is how important is this for the reader to know and how hurtful might it be to somebody else in the book for example if he said something bad about one of his friends or somebody i knew he loved
i'd say okay does it is that something that really furthers the goal of the book and is that somebody who'll give a lot of pain something that'll give a lot of pain to somebody who's friends with are very close to steve jobs and so maybe i was at that stage in my career
where you don't want to put in everything that could be explosive or be a headline or be click bait because you're trying to do what's good for history and good for the reader and also not do it in a way that causes unnecessary pain to people and so yes i i tried to smooth over some things
especially near the end of the book steve believed that even though we live in a virtual world the physical spaces were the secret hiding in plain sight for creativity i believe you wrote creativity comes from spontaneous meetings from random discussions you run into someone you ask what they're doing
you say wow and soon you're cooking up all sorts of ideas what do you think would be his take on remote work today i think that if you look at the coronavirus lockdowns and the way we were all sent to our room for a while we can understand what works well virtually as
many things do including a lot of unnecessary meetings work better virtually um but we also know the importance of face-to-face interactions actually seeing people especially when it's teamwork you can uh do teamwork like in my book the code breaker they're able to work on three continents and different countries
and help figure out crispr or gene editing tool but when they started off the product project it really helped to be there physically to be there in person to be kicking around ideas in a lab over dinner at a restaurant and likewise whether it was steve jobs who designed the pixar
headquarters to make sure everybody had to walk through the atrium and bump into people and exchange ideas to the apple headquarters to all of our places physical places tend to have serendipity to them they tend to be unscheduled encounters they tend to be things where you can actually gauge
somebody's interests and emotions perhaps better and we look at places throughout history that have been cradles of creativity and that's sometimes what my books are about why was it that in the 1470s when leonardo da vinci goes to florence it's a mix of people from all over
the trading world from from the arab world with the fall of the ottoman empire from all over europe because of the strength of the florence currency they're all there in florence that becomes a cradle of creativity likewise silicon valley becomes a cradle of creativity in the 1970s and for that
matter philadelphia in the 1770s and this happens because certain people get attracted to places where there's diverse ideas and an energy to them and doing it on zoom can sometimes recreate 60 of that but as a professor at tulane you know here in new orleans i did a lot of my teaching on zoom
but i love the fact that the kids were actually on campus and that i could meet with them some and now i'm back seeing them and we're just kicking around things and discussing things i think tulane was right to do in person campus even during some of the pandemic and it showed me how imperso how
important these in-person encounters are and if you ask the students and you ask them to compare their experiences to people who went to other universities that were shut down they'll just tell you how important it was to be able to hang around other people i like the idea of these pockets
of sort of innovation that crop up whether it's britain or florence or silicon valley what's your hypotheses on why they tend to burn out well they tend to burn out sometimes when the tolerance and the diversity that distinguished say florence in the 1470s get hit by a saving a roller or somebody who's going
to ban and burn books and have bonfires of the vanities and we see the backlash against creativity innovation and diversity happening we had happened in this country uh in over the past uh four or five years it's happened in europe some and in hungary and so you see a backlash
against uh modernity you also see what's happening in the united states which i think is really good which is the dispersal of creativity and cradles of creativity it used to be very concentrated in silicon valley when it was all engineer driven but now that it's driven by people with creativity in
various realms whether it be music or art or literature or for that matter figuring out truck driving routes or figuring out manufacturing logistics or boxing materials you see and also where the creativity and the technology is not just digital engineering but tends to have to be
connected to the humanities or for that matter to the life sciences so now in the united states you're seeing places like austin texas or nashville or new orleans or uh boston of course with uh the huge boom in biotech that's super huge that's you know kindle squares the new silicon
valley but even in small places like chattanooga or cleveland mississippi places with good colleges or universities where there's creativity you don't have to have it all concentrated in silicon valley the way it was for you know the uh final quarter of the 20th century
do you think we need it to sort of like come together for a revolution and then disperse and then another hundred years from now come together again and then disperse with whatever the new technology is or is it something that can always be dispersed i think that it's almost like we found during the
pandemic which is if you want some bursts of creativity it helps to have a lot of people actually interacting in real time face to face in an intimate fashion and then you can disperse that creativity whether it's a group that gets together and starts figuring out how to do gene editing technology and
then they all go to their labs around the world and do it on dropbox and zoom and other ways of social media i think that's a metaphor for how we as a society sometimes have big bangs that start in a singularity a particular place and then the energy gets dispersed and
people during the pandemic moved to places like my hometown of new orleans because they could work anywhere and they decided they wanted to work in a place that was more fun or edgier or had more music or more food whatever they liked and so that dispersal happened because of the pandemic i think they
also found that in places like that where they're great research universities like tulane are great medical centers there's ways of having the creativity but once again as we see with this new revolution i write about in the code breakers which is biotech it does help
to have a certain center of the explosion at the moment that's kendall square in cambridge with harvard and mit and then the boston area which has more research hospitals you know in french than the any other place in the world so you're right it's sort of big bangs coming out of intense places like
kendall square cambridge or the berkeley area now in california where jennifer doudna is but then dispersing well we're watching in memphis just recently they're using crispr to cure people of sickle cell well you know that's memphis is a new center of creativity i want to
get to crispr i mean part of the the challenge of interviewing somebody like you who's written so many amazing works about so many people is there's so much to talk about steve saw firsthand uh how money changed people at apple and how a lot of the misfits started to act rich i think he
had a comment about fancy cars and big homes and how did he keep so grounded throughout life and not let money ruin him i think it's important for people not to be driven just by the toys you can buy i see that in elon musk now compared to some other billionaires he's not defining himself by the
you know the amount of houses i think he's divesting himself of his houses steve jobs never had the fanciest mansions and he took quite a long time before he even got furniture for them because he didn't define himself by material object near the end of his life i asked him you know about the meaning
of all this and he said that he learned from his guru in india that life is like a river and at first you think that if you're successful you get to take many things out of the river products people have made or ideas they've come up with but he said eventually in life
you realize that it's not what you get to take out of the river it's what you get to put into the river he was a very spiritual person guided by his zen buddhist training and i think that helped keep them grounded not only was he spiritual he he had a reputation for being hard on people i think at one
point he said i don't think i run roughshod over people but if something sucks i tell them to their face it's my job to be honest have we lost that today well intellectual honesty is something that can push people make people a great leader is something that's i've been a
manager i've run companies i know that being really brutal and intellectually honest uh to people is important first of all you motivate them you drive them you let them know where they're not performing and how they can and you make sure that you don't have a team as steve jobs said that's filled
with b players you only got a players on the team i think we all have to look into ourselves as managers i was i mean i had many failings as a manager when i ran time magazine or cnn and one of my failings is i wasn't as comfortable being brutally honest or telling people they sucked
as perhaps a stronger manager would have been uh but after a while i realized all right i gotta play to the strengths i have i look at somebody like uh you know elon musk or jeff bezos or bill gates people who've run great companies i look at how jennifer doudna forms a lab and a consortium to do
experiments on gene editing and i say how do you form teams you know jennifer doudna will tell me i like to make sure everybody meets each other before they join our team and that they all feel that they fit in and everybody feels they fit in and i said well that's a
little different than a steve jobs who likes creative tension likes to make sure that people are going to sometimes push back and not just go with the flow and she said yeah everybody's got their style but my style is i like collegiality and collaboration you can look at ben franklin you know he's
somebody who was good at forging collaboration and cooperation pushing compromise smoothing over differences he was definitely not known for intellectual honesty in fact sometimes he was considered being too diplomatic which is a euphemism for not being all that infam uh intellectually honest but in building
a team like our founders you needed passionate people like john and sam adams you needed people of high rectitude like washington and smart people like jefferson and madison but you also needed somebody who could be the glue and who held people together so sometimes pushing people through
intellectual honesty and brutality is important if you're going to create the most insanely great phone or ipod but also sometimes being the person who glues people together and gets them to work in harmony that's a talent you need so i write about those different talents
whether it's ben franklin pulling together the founders jennifer doudna pulling together a consortium of scientists to fight covid or steve jobs creating the awesome team he created at apple let's come back to cnn for a second what happened there and what are some of the lessons that you drew from that
well i think that technology happened it used to be in the 80s and 90s when i was working at time magazine and then at cnn there were two or three news magazines and two or three great national newspapers and two or three television networks and two or three cable networks and
uh you just had to get a broad audience and you had to have reliable information so that advertisers would want to put their product in the midst of the information you were giving and uh so if especially at time magazine but then it's cnn when i was first there fox and msnbc hadn't quite risen yet and so our
goal was to have a broad spectrum of viewers left and right and center non-ideological we wrote about we did stories on everything from science to arts to music to climate whatever it may be and so we want aiming to get a strong hardcore ideological niche when you have
500 channels to choose from and 500 podcasts to pick from and 500 places on the talk radio dial and you know 500 feeds you could follow on social media then it's not about getting a broad audience it's about getting a passionate audience who's going to stick with you that was a formula fox used
they didn't necessarily have more overall viewers but their viewers were more passionate spent more time with them their ratings became higher so it became a formula which is that you went after not just engaging your audience on social media on cable tv or on radio or podcast but sometimes enraging your
audience because an enraged audience is going to be more passionate it will ensure it'll share things it'll make things go viral and so i think all of media suffered because the algorithms and the ratings and everything else provided incentives for things that were tended to be divisive and
outraging people and that gave us the type of more charged and sometimes more partisan atmosphere we have today how do you think we we sort of bring that back or do we or is this something where you've walked through a one-way door and there is no going back well not all problems
have solutions and it's clear globally we're having problems uh having a social media and digital media that has high value information is reliable and doesn't incent the spread of misinformation or of inflammatory things that are designed to get people mad i think there are probably certain
ways to try to put some of the genie back into the bottle that includes in my mind getting uh user revenue reader revenue i think that if you're only chasing eyeballs as click bait for advertisers then you're going to have a different incentive than if you're the wall street journal or the
new york times or a uh many other things uh you know vox media whatever may be your preference and people are either having to subscribe to you like they do for many on sub stack or what i hope would we'll see in the future is a way to pay for content where you don't have to subscribe for an entire
year say to the boston globe because you're interested in the red sox and you want one particular story but you can pay per article i think that will give an incentive to people to produce content that is high value because if it ain't high value people aren't going to pay for it
and it'll likewise yeah incent the notion that you have to have reliable information so i think when we get to other business models where people are having the option to pay for content or the option to have only advertiser driven content that might provide an economic foundation
for higher value information and for information that's there to inform rather than to inflame i want to switch gears here and come back to da vinci for a second i mean i think it seems natural to sort of explore da vinci after jobs because like jobs he was at the intersection of
technology and arts only in a very different era i think you said leonardo had the ability not just to connect art and science but to make no distinction between the beauty of art and science i remember all of steve jobs product presentations lead in with that street sign showing an intersection of two streets
called the arts and technology or the liberal arts and uh engineering and i think people who stand at that intersection tend to be more creative obviously in history the person who both symbolizes it but practices it is leonardo da vinci his vitruvian man you
know that naked guy doing jumping jacks in the circle in the square that is an icon and a symbol and an intentional drawing of leonardo's to show the intersection of us humans uh with the humanities with the sciences and with spirituality how we're standing in the cosmos and in the earth uh in a a
drawing of perfect scientific accuracy and mathematical interest squaring the circle among other things which is a great old mathematical problem so leonardo da vinci was the person in history who did the most to understand all that was understandable about all things that you
could have knowledge of from art to anatomy you know from math to music to zoology he tried to understand everything and i think that that was a key not only to his creativity but what he represented which was known as the renaissance man and that's what the renaissance was all about the rediscovery of classical
knowledge but also the connection of the humanities to the sciences before then most wisdom including scientific wisdom was handed down by people who interpreted the teachings of the church suddenly with leonardo you're as he put it following people like himself he called
himself a disciple of experiments of experience he really cared to have a fact-based empirical approach to knowledge and that connected it to the humanities and that's what the renaissance was about he was a bit of a misfit and getting back to that sort of observation of reality or experiential
learning that was a byproduct of him being an illegitimate child was it not well leonardo definitely did not fit in he was born out of wedlock he was gay he was left-handed he was distracted he had flamboyant ways of dressing and as a young teenager he arrives in florence not fitting in
and yet florence and this is why it's a cradle of creativity embraces him the medici family gives him work and there you have leonardo who both fits in and doesn't fit in and so he has a deep curiosity about the cosmos what is our role in the cosmos how do we find ourselves in this strange world how are
we supposed to fit in so throughout his life he's driven by a passion and by a curiosity about what is this world in which we find ourselves and how do we fit in one thing i like about da vinci at least or i took away from your work is it doesn't appear he has like a mind
like newton that just has so much more horsepower than we have um and could do things that we could never do it seems like the stuff that he did was within our reach and it was driven by almost just pure curiosity how did he how did he go about pursuing so many interests and so many subjects and get
so much mental horsepower out of his mind it's a good point because i wrote about albert einstein and none of us can really truly aspire to be einstein he had more mental processing power he's able to do the equations that uh describe general relativity you know things that most of us mortals
would not be able to accomplish but leonardo da vinci and ben franklin for that matter were not necessarily the highest powered uh you know intellectual firepower people of their time leonardo was probably not as great of a you know intellectual um rigor as luco pacioli his friend who was
a mathematician but what leonardo da vinci had just like benjamin franklin had just like steve jobs had was an insatiable curiosity and a willingness to be curious about those things that you and i you know sort of quit noticing after a while i looked in leonardo's notebooks i was
reading through his notebooks and there's a section on why is the sky blue i can look right out of my window here right now it's a deep blue sky but i've spent all day not puzzling why is the sky blue and what amazed me when i saw that in leonardo's notebooks was boom it's in einstein's notebooks he writes
why is the sky blue they both do experiments leonardo sprays water in the air and shines light through it einstein you know is using lord raley's formula for the diffraction of the spectrum of light all trying to figure out why the sky is blue now you and i are not necessarily into all these
science experiments but every day we can push ourselves to be a little bit more curious to see the water rippling as ben franklin did on the pond and say why do the ripples go a different way from the wind or why does the duck have webbed feet which causes franklin to invent swimming
flippers and causes leonardo to try to understand flying and we see it as a kid we're all curious as kids until grown-ups say quit asking so many dumb questions and then we get sort of the curiosity kicked out of us but leonardo teaches us that to be creative all we have to do is nurture that natural
curiosity we all have inside of us one of the things that struck me that you wrote about a little bit was why fish are faster in water than birds are in air can you explain that well yeah i mean these are the type of things that leonardo was curious about leonardo says
wait water uh is heavier it's harder to go through why can fish go faster than birds and he looked at how birds flap their wings he notices which species flap them up faster flap them down faster when they take off he notices how the webb feats of duck work he does experiments with flowing water
so does ben franklin when he gets to london franklin has a little machine that shows flowing water and he's looking for how things resist the flow of water and how they can use water use a flipper in water to go faster because there's more to push against than there is with the
air now these are simple things you and i can figure out hey you can push against water you can push against air what will work what won't but the thing about ben franklin and about leonardo da vinci is that they're both doing that they're even making little experiments desktop experiments to figure it out what was da
vinci's relationship with michelangelo not good they're both in florence both gay uh leonardo was proudly and openly gay had a boyfriend salahi who he draws and writes about and brings with him wherever he goes but michelangelo it was sort of known as the agony and the ecstasy he feared the
wrath of the lord he was much more religious than leonardo da vinci was agonized about his um you know sexual orientation and many other things and so they're not destined to be the best friends uh uh michelangelo is a little bit younger uh but they're both the superstars in the
art world in florence uh in the late 1400s and they have a few encounters on the street that turn a bit nasty um but partly i just think it was a difference in personality leonardo loved people he was very gregarious he always had scientists and artists and apprentices and students and musicians
and historians and writers around him and michelangelo was very much of a loner and i guess that's why i was attracted a bit more to leonardo da vinci i tend to think as we talked about earlier in the podcast that having people around you stimulates your creativity and so they pushed each
other to go to go beyond where they would have gone on their own i think at one point they both quit the same commission didn't they they were both hired as rivals and right they were great competitors and the elders of florence took uh made use of that by commissioning them
to do works on opposite sides of the town of the big hall the big room in the town hall building and leonardo was going to do a battle of angeari painting and michelangelo was doing another battle painting and there they were almost as if it were you know a shark tank or some you know bake off
and they each become somewhat unnerved uh leonardo's drawings are just spectacular with horses having their faces contorted in rage and everything else michelangelo has a lot of nude people bathing i mean they're both very intense drawings but they both quit before they finish it's almost
as if the competition drove them forward but after a while the competition became too intense michelangelo leaves to go to rome and ends up painting the ceiling of the sistine chapel leonardo ends up going to milan and among other things painting the last supper so they each remain rather
productive but they forego that commission in florence that's a really interesting point one of the things that struck me about da vinci and painting was that he only finished 12 paintings and to what extent was perfect sort of the enemy of good with him totally i mean he was very much a perfectionist
something that he shared with steve jobs who would hold up shipping the original macintosh because the circuit board inside was not beautiful enough and so that perfection uh really hurt him but steve jobs finally realized they had a sign made for him when he came back to apple after
his exile and he had talked about what real artists do they put up a sign saying real artist ship which means you get the product out the door leonardo never had that sign on his studio door all of his great paintings took a long time even when he finished them he never really delivered them the mona lisa was
a commission of a merchant in florence uh for a picture of his wife leonardo keeps that painting as he goes to milan keeps the paintings he goes to the realm keeps a painting until it's by his deathbed when he's in france and he keeps thinking there's more and more
brushstrokes i can put on it to make it more perfect to make the eyes follow you to make the smile more mysterious so even though that is pretty much a finished painting it still wasn't shipped to the original person with the commission and so many times whether it's the um adoration of the magi
or jerome in the wilderness or for that matter the battle of angieri and the florence town hall we have half of what leonardo did we have the drawings we have the sketches we have an unfinished painting but sometimes the conception was more important to him than the execution and
when the execution became hard or became something he didn't feel that he get hit out of the park he just left it at the conceptual stage that's really interesting and it's my understanding the mona lisa wasn't ever famous during his day it became famous when it was stolen from the lube is that correct no
um first of all it was a grand painting even in his time and even by his bed in paris i've done paris in france he's uh uh you know in a uh chateau in france where the king has brought him to france and become his patron cardinal comes by from italy and admires the painting and writes about it so it
was known by the end of leonardo's life that it was going to be a masterpiece it doesn't become the most famous painting in the world in fact it remains part of the collections of the king of france it's you know hung in their chateaus and eventually in their castles uh so it it doesn't reach the stature
that it now is i think you could say it's the most famous painting ever done and that grows over time including when it was once stolen but over the course of history that painting has mesmerized art critics more and more and it really is interactive it really does speak to you when you first see the
mona lisa you might be disappointed it's rather small but as you spend time with it it continues to delight and to surprise you even as you move your head and watch the lips and the eyes change it's a masterpiece of both science and of art and that was through the the painstaking
addition of microscopic sort of brush strokes over years and years and years to create that effect is that correct absolutely the more layers sheer thin layers of his painting his brush strokes because he understands how light diffracts how it hits our eye that if it
hits the center of your eye you see more detail if it's the corner eye you see shadows and colors better so if you look at the very detail directly at the corner of the lips of the mona lisa they actually aren't turned up but if you move your head a little bit and you catch the shadows and the colors
better the lips seem to turn up so it becomes an interactive smile all because of the scientific brilliance of leonardo da vinci as well as his passion for perfecting the mona lisa that's so cool what was the thing that surprised you the most about da vinci through your study of him i think
that he wanted to know everything and that he starts off wanting to understand things including science in furtherance of his art like he's dissecting neck muscles in order to do saint jerome in the wilderness or he's studying the math or perspective in order to get the adoration of the magi correct
but then after a while he's dissecting uh cadavers you know to study the muscles and the skeletons but he's going down he's studying the heart he's studying the heart valves this is not what you need to know for your paintings he's doing it not because it's useful but because he's curious and i think
what surprised me was that leonardo da vinci's curiosity was driven not because there was some utility to it but because it delighted him i want to come next to ada loveless you considered or is that how you say it out of love lace love lace aydah aydah wanna come next to ada lovelace you
considered right up writing a biography on her in fact she's the first and last figure in your book the innovators what makes her such a special historical figure she was the first person to understand the general purpose computer could do and she writes the first algorithm so in
many ways she has the conceptual birth of the computer and what struck me is something we've talked about in this podcast was people who stand at the intersection of the arts and the sciences her father was lord byron the great romantic poet but her mother wasn't particularly fond of lord byron
when ada was growing up if you know anything about lord byron he wasn't the perfect husband and so um aydah's mother had ada tutored only in mathematics hoping it would prevent her from being poetical instead ada invents what she calls poetical science not in events but she
embraces poetical science loving both the humanities and the science loving math as well as poetry and so when she sees the looms in england that are weaving these great patterns using punch cards she realizes that the use of punch cards to determine how a beautiful pattern could be
woven that those punch cards could be used on a machine that one of her friends charles babbage was doing called the analytical engine which was a numerical calculator and you could use punch cards and what ada wrote in his her notes to the analytical engine was that with this type of device
the machine could do not only numbers but anything that could be notated in symbols it could do words it could do music it could do patterns it could do art and what does that remind you of that's what a general purpose computer can do it can manipulate the information of anything that can be notated in
symbols and so this was a great intellectual leap under appreciated by history except for those who are fans of ada lovelace and their legion and this wasn't appreciated until later with alan turing right or was it was she appreciated in her time or was it her leader she was a very complex figure in
her time and uh probably a good full-length biography but it's somewhat tragic she became addicted to drugs addicted to gambling you know gambled away the family jewels had a painful life opium trying to kill the paint but so she was not a great figure of history
but she did lay down the idea that machines could do everything except think on their own that machines could not be creative that it took the humans to be creative ones to come up with new ideas uh to think different whereas the machines could process based on instructions we gave them
alan turing a century after ada lovelace writes her notes on the different uh the analytical engine writes his book uh his uh paper called ken machines think and he writes about what he calls ada lovelace's objection lady lovelace's objection he calls it which is that machines can't think that they'll be
able to process any symbols we give them but they won't be able to be creative thought and touring sort of pushes the opposite approach which is yes machines will be able to think we will have machine learning we'll eventually have artificial intelligence that's still a debate going on today whether it's elon
musk or bill gates or many other people they debate whether machines will ever be able to think creatively like the human mind will i don't have an answer but i do love in my book the innovators is about exploring the ada lovelace school which includes ada lovelace but doug
engelbart and alan kaye and jcr licklider and culminates with steve jobs the people who believe that advances will come from human computer connections human computer interfaces like the graphical interfaces on our computer that make us closer to our machines and then the other school
being the allen turing school that goes all the way through people including bill gates who think that machines will be able to acquire an artificial intelligence that will surpass humans and perhaps leave humans behind so if we zoom out a little bit what are some of the lessons that we can observe that are
common across these subjects that are innovators that we can apply at work or in our day-to-day life have a broad vision be curious about everything i had the great good fortune of growing up at time magazine which was one of the last of the general interest magazines and it
meant that one week i'd be writing the medical section the next week i'll be writing the music section i'd be writing foreign affairs one week in business the next week and maybe uh politics the the following week and who knows you know anatomy the next week so i got to be interested in many things
and to me that helped me see patterns that happen across creation those are the lessons of my great innovators nowadays we tend to be more siloed whether you're at a university and you specialize in a silo or for that matter your journal your a media thing and you're not a general
interest magazine there's not a market that much for general interest magazines so you become a podcast with a particular focus so i think my lesson is be curious about everything don't specialize too soon be able to go deep on a few subjects but make sure you can also go wide i think
that's a really good lesson i i just want to challenge a little bit about what you said about writing about multiple different subjects so how does that affect your ability to write about them and understand them if you're just sort of like switching context week to week to week
how do you develop a deep fluency in the subject you're writing about you know assal khan who does khan academy has a great phrase which is you can learn anything and uh the hardest for me was learning the math of general relativity i had to study tensor calculus i'm still no great
expert at it but if you put your mind to it you can learn anything after learning the mathematical equations of general relativity from my einstein bio and by the way i didn't put them in the book i just felt i had to know it in order to simplify it in the book uh i figured okay i can easily learn
uh what rna does as a messenger inside a human cell when it comes to a coronavirus vaccine that wasn't quite as hard as the math of general relativity so i do think if you put your mind to it you can pretty much be familiar with many different fields secondly i do think that there's a value to the
person who's not the expert you know especially when it comes to science and technology most scientists and i love them aren't great at popularizing and explaining what they do some are brian green is carl sagan was neil degrasse tyson is but generally scientists they're part of a priesthood
and they talk in a type of jargon and it's hard for them to explain the beauty of what they're working on so i think there's room for people like myself who are just passionately curious and will take the time sometimes a year or so to drill deep into a subject but then we'll try to write about it for the
layperson for the person who's not an expert for the person whose last biology course was in high school when you worked out einstein's theories were you using his papers or modern sort of explanations to help you understand them well certainly i started with some
modern explanations especially when it comes to general relativity and special relativity the really cool thing about special relativity which was this first one done in 1905 which is basically the speed of light is constant you can't surpass the speed of light eventually leads him to his equation
that becomes equal mc squared special relativity is not the harder one general relativity is and especially on special relativity you can actually read the paper you want if i were a college physics professor instead of assigning books about relativity i'd say read that 1905 paper it only has one footnote to
it and it's gloriously written and so yes i try to go back to the original now having said that i've read uh four of the original lectures he gave on general relativity and those were very helpful but when i read the actual papers that he submitted and i think the end of 1914 on general
relativity those were beyond my pay grade i had to read secondary sources to have them explain to me how important is it you're you're a writer you're a professor how important is it that we go to the source when we can and don't get it through these secondary third fourth
order sources well that's why i when i did leonardo da vinci we're so blessed we have more than 7000 pages of his notebooks i mean paper is a great technology for the storage and retrieval of information it has a battery life that's almost infinite it operating system never goes out so i can
go around the world and look at leonardo's notebooks and not only sort of read in a secondhand way what information he had in it but see the doodles in the margins the way he drew little designs to see how his mind leaped on the page from you know sketching out possible faces for the
last supper to figuring out how to square the circle using triangles and circles and rectangles so i like seeing his mind leap around on the page same with ben franklin i went up to yale in the box after boxes of papers einstein's papers in the end i read most of them in bound
volumes which you can actually see behind my shoulder that are on my bookshelf but i went to hebrew university where the original papers are and to cal tech where the papers project is because i actually wanted to see those last pages of his notebooks because i think there's something inspiring too
about seeing the original physical product i i like the inspiration and sort of the doodles and the added context i also think that there's something to seeing their own words and seeing the what they thought was important and maybe the variables they thought were important or how they
intersected and played out over time versus the interpretations of other people which are simplifying by necessary or necessarily simplifying i guess i think something's lost in i also find that when it's possible when it's about a contemporary figure you can read all of the secondary
sources and then you can read the original documents but then you have to do the third part of the triangulation you have to talk to people so if i read the books about [Music] steve jobs that'd be fine if i read some of the memos he wrote but then i have to say why did he write that email or what was
that memo really designed to do and then you get the interviews and so i'm not as a historian the best at archival uh diving you know bob carrow david mccullough yeah they're wizards when they come to archives and as a journalist i may not be the best interview bob woodward could
probably outrun me on any day of the week but i think i'm pretty good at the intersection of being able to do a whole lot of interviews and getting people to talk to me but also going really deep into the archives and studying the written record and so i like to combine the two and that's part of my journalist
training let's explore that a little bit about the the interviews how do you how do you extract information from other people like what is there a tip or trick or process or anything you've learned that's really effective at getting the best information from other people my
first day as a journalist in the times picayune of new orleans when i was about 17 and we had a summer job i went and somebody had a young woman a young girl had been killed and i went out and i was supposed to find out about it and when i called the story back in as the days before email i had
to go to a pay phone if you remember what that was and phone it back to the office my editor said what happened when you interviewed the parents i said well i didn't go bother the parents and he said go knock on the door and interview the parents so i took a deep breath and
i did it and i learned my first lesson which is people like to talk and they like to talk about themselves and what happened and they especially like to talk if you like to listen if you're not trying to guide the talk you're not trying to explain things to them and so i just said tell me about it
and they did and so ever since then i realized i can call up anybody and they usually want to talk especially about themselves because they usually find themselves very interesting and if i just listen they'll keep talking and if sometimes they don't answer my question
if i don't follow up right away i just stay there and listen and i'm silent they got to feel this feel the silence and they talk let's come to crispr and gene editing what is crispr and what is gene editing well crispr is just a pretty simple tool that we can reprogram to cut our own dna
if we decide that there's a sequence in our dna we don't like like a sequence that causes sickle cell in our blood or causes us to be short or maybe some days sequences that uh predispose us to be depressed or whatever crispr is a tool where you can edit them out it's a tool that jennifer doudna and her
colleagues won the nobel prize for this past year uh inventing and what they did was they adapted something that bacteria have been using for a billion years bacteria have this these clustered repeated interspersed sequences known as crisprs in their own genetic code and that comes
from having to fight off viruses they take a mug shot of the virus that attacks them and then if the virus attacks again they use a scissors known as an enzyme to cut it up and that's pretty useful in this year when we've had to learn how to fight viruses it's also useful because you can
repurpose that tool to cut our own dna to edit our own genes i mean the promise of this on one hand is sort of like making our lives better fighting cancer fighting covet we're taller we're faster we're smarter we're stronger and yet on the other hand we have things like bioweapons designer
babies are we messing with things we don't understand yes and that's why jennifer doudna after she invented this technology was shaken because she had a nightmare that somebody wanted to understand the technology she invented she goes into the room and it's adolf hitler and she realizes that in the wrong hands
with the wrong sets of of social guidance on what we're going to use this tool for it could be both something of great promise but also of peril so my book is about her not only inventing these tools with her colleagues but also then gathering scientists as well as ethicists and
politicians and ordinary people to say what are the rules of the road are we going to use this tool should we allow this tool to be used to fight sickle cell anemia well yeah that makes sense and what about used in people to make us more immune to viruses well maybe that makes sense
what about increasing our memory well do we want to do that what about allowing rich people to buy better memory for their kids but since this technology is not going to be free it will encode the inequalities of our society into our species well we know we don't want to go there so my book not
only is about understanding what the technology is but i want people to understand it because we're all going to have to be part of this discussion we can't seed it to the scientists to be in charge of this and so the book is about uh this uh part of the uh last half of
the book is about going step by step saying when should we use it and when should we not we all have to be part of this discussion one thing that's interesting about this discussion is unlike weapons of mass destruction where they're hard to accumulate uh they're you know they're in relatively few hands
it seems like uh biohackers have or or could develop this in the their basement and well you know i edited james and jennifer dowd in his lab i motto of my old school i went to a new orleans was we learned to do by doing and so i did it and that kind of frightened me because i was able to edit
human cells now don't worry we flushed them down the drain with chlorine and the cells i edited are not now part of our planet but yeah they're bio hackers one really funny interesting delightful and slightly controversial guy in my book josiah zainer runs a store called the odin and you can
go online and get crisper and use crisper maybe to regulate the myostatin so you'll have bigger muscles things like that so yes this is not like an atom bomb which can't be built in a basement so we're going to have to learn what are the social rules of the road in doing this
but how do we enforce those rules well i think they only get to be enforced if we all agreed to them and that's why i wrote this book which is i'm hoping we'll talk about this enough and we'll have a social consensus people say well that's hard to have but yeah we do that all the time we have
social consensus now maybe against elephant tusks trafficking or slavery child trafficking or against certain drugs and the and yeah people can make drugs and people can smuggle drugs or whatever but we sort of have social rules against everything from shoplifting to drug trafficking to
whatever and that's how society tends to regulate these things now with crispr it's not like you have to reg you have to stop it totally i mean one atom bomb and you can be toast but you know if we can prevent crispr from becoming you know a regular commonplace thing uh on places we don't want to have it
like uh you know certain things we decide we don't want to use crispr for uh i think we'll be able as a society to um decide no this is where you don't go and this is where you do go it strikes me that one of the places that have an immediate incentive to use this aside
from what we've talked about is sort of sports athletes you know if we can cure as we have sickle cell this past year by making blood cells that aren't sickled and can carry more oxygen well there are other genetic traits of blood cells including mutations that a lot of sprinters and great bicyclists have that
allow your blood cells to carry more oxygen that would be a pretty easy fix if you wanted uh to you know win the tour de france but more importantly if you decide you want to edit your children so that they will be great athletes and they can have faster muscle reflexes or blood that
carries more oxygen and that's something that is doable in the next 20 30 years or maybe before then but that could be commonplace in the next 20 or 30 years but we have to decide whether we want it and you say well can we control it was like doping i mean even now you know
there's questions about doping in various sports uh yeah we try to control it and sometimes we don't control it perfectly but we say here's what we feel should happen and here's what we feel should not happen we can test for my book i try to take you through that so we'll all be able to
debate that and not just debate it but discuss it over dinner and say would we go here would i have it would i design a children to be this way with doping we can test for we can't really test if somebody's edited their genes can we yeah well i think there are certain ways you can know if gene
editing has occurred and there's certain natural mutations that say good sprinters tend to have which allow their blood to carry more oxygen so if you secretly caused your child to have that mutation it would probably be hard to know that it wasn't just a natural one
although if somebody wanted to test your own dna and say wait a minute that kid could not have naturally inherited that sequence there are ways you could do it but here's a more philosophical question why is it that it's we would say it's unfair to edit your kid to have that mutation to carry more
blood oxygen but it is fair if it just randomly happens and you happen to be born in whatever sweden or in uh you you know kenya or someplace and you have that mutation is that more fair that some people as part of a natural lottery get that mutation is that more fair than getting it from your
you know parents doctors and geneticists uh so it's a complicated moral question about what's fair what's jennifer's take on how this should be i wouldn't say regulated but thought of or what's the yeah in my book after i discuss her having the nightmare about hitler she goes on a journey to bring scientists
together and to discuss things uh and when they do she's initially against the use of crispr especially to make inheritable edits called the germ line be able to edit sperm and egg cells and early stage embryos so that the edits will affect the entire all the cells of the newborn child and will be
inherited by all future generations says that's where you should draw the line but at a certain point she became more and more open and certainly coveted helped open our minds to maybe the fact that one chinese doctor already edited the embryos of babies to give them inheritable edits to not have the
receptor for hiv the virus that causes aids so maybe covet opens our minds a bit and says well maybe we should edit the species to have fewer viral receptors if we can do it safely without unintended consequences so jennifer dowden's thinking evolves as does mind as we go through covert but it also
evolves every day now i mean i'm heartbroken i'm looking my cell phone right here i could pull one up for you which is the emails i get every morning of people who've read the book and they say my child has you know engelman syndrome my child has cystic fibrosis my child
here's a picture of him he's four years old but he can't go to the bathroom by himself and they say he's going to die in three years or here's my granddaughter and they say she has another you know five years to live because she's got this genetic uh condition can you get me in touch with jennifer
doudna can you save my baby well i can't save their baby but it does make me think yes we've got to progress with crispr and other gene editing tools because it'll alleviate a lot of misery on one hand we have the why should we do it but on the other hand why not why not
do it and how can we sometimes say no how do you say no to somebody whose kid has multiple sclerosis or cystic fibrosis or has huntington's and say we're not going to try to edit that out would it be immoral not to use it jennifer had her own michelangelo through this there was a bit of
competition i understand in terms of coming up with this can you explain that story to us yeah the book is partly about the great race between jennifer doudna and her team which includes emanuel scharpenche the french biologist who won the nobel prize with her and they're competing against many
labs around the world but especially a really great and charming young scientist named fong zhang who is at the road institute of mit and harvard and after jennifer and emmanuel discover how crispr can be engineered to be a tool to cut dna a race ensues to say who can make it
work and show how it works in human cells first and it takes them both six months along with some other labs and it's a race that jennifer dowden's team loses actually by two weeks and fung jiang's team gets the uh original the first patents on it and they've been involved in both this race
and this competition and now a patent battle over it so competition helps spur science it's a good thing competition can be for patents it can be for nobel prizes it can be for publication priority uh and in this case it's a race just like when jennifer was a young child she read the double helix the book that jim
watson wrote about the discovery of the structure of dna and the race that he and francis crick were in against rosalind franklin and maurice wilkins at another university and against linus pauling so competition can make you do bad things qriken watson purloin the imagery done
by rosalind franklin without her permission but competition also causes you to work nights and weekends so my book is about the good sides and the bad sides of competition and the good sides and the bad sides of collaboration if she finished second how did she and her partner there win the nobel prize well
the nobel prize was given partly for the original discovery which jennifer doudna and emmanuel sharpened clearly made in the middle of 2012 which is discovering how to repurpose a crispr system like the one bacteria use and make it cut dna at a targeted spot they showed how you could engineer
a guide made of rna that would say cut the dna right here and so that's the big breakthrough that's the publication in the middle of 2012 that sets this thing in motion six months later at the beginning of 2013 they both publish how do you optimize this tool to work in human cells now the patent
battle is over what's the more important discovery what's the original discovery was it obvious and that's a term of law obviousness that once you made the discovery that jennifer dowden and emmanuel sharpened j made was it obvious how to make it work in human cells and
then the nobel prize committee is mainly for discoveries and i was surprised i stayed up i woke up early that morning 4am to hear the nobel announcement thinking it would not be crisper you know it would take many years before crispr would win the nobel prize but
then when i heard on the live stream them announced that it was for rewriting the code of life i knew it was going to be for crispr and then they named emmanuel sharpen j they named jennifer doudna the two heroes in my book and i take a pause because there's always three or there's usually three
and then there was never not a third so i was a little surprised i thought fong jiang would have been the third but i'm not a member of the swedish academy did you get to talk to fong jiang oh i spent much time in fong jiang's lab a wonderful guy born in china but raised in iowa with
that corn fed cheeriness and openness and graciousness that comes from having immigrated to uh i'd say a small town but it was uh i think cedar rapids and then des moines which are actually big towns but had that sort of small town hospitality that america has or used to have to immigrants like that and this
would have made america great and made him such a cheery wonderful open character who invited me to his lab even though he knew i was writing about his competitor so he's one of the heroes of the book as well i'm curious where his opinion on how this plays out or should
be used is different from jennifer's i think that a couple of years ago there was a dispute or disagreement among scientists about whether to have an outright moratorium in other words to say on on inheritable edits in other words don't use it in reproductive cells or early-stage embryos
and after the chinese doctor did that to cut out the receptor uh for hiv the virus that causes aids there was an uproar and a group of scientists said let's have a moratorium and those scientists were led by eric lander a truly brilliant charismatic scientist who ran the broad institute
where fong jiang worked he's now the chief science advisor to president biden so eric lander and his camp were in favor of a moratorium and that included fung jiang jennifer doudna was in a slightly different camp which said we don't want to do this right away let's have some guidelines about when you would make
inheritable edits but let's keep the research going and let's not use the word moratorium because a moratorium once you impose it it sort of becomes a moral thing and it gets harder to lift so they generally agree about the use of crispr and gene editing but that was sort of a small difference
in the past few years are there any areas where you disagree with them you know my thinking evolves every time i get an email my thinking evolves i'll tell you the story not about me but about a wonderful ethicist in my book he's actually only 17. his name is david sanchez you'll see
the picture of him looking at the little tube of blood because he's a 17 year old who loves playing basketball except for when he doubles over in pain in the middle of the court because he has sickle cell and so they're treating him for sickle cell at stanford at one point matthew porteous who's a great genetic engineer
there says we may be able someday to edit your sperm or reproductive cells so your children won't have sickle cell and david sanchez says that would be great but then a little later he says but maybe that should be up to my kids after they're born for them to get to decide do they want
to be edited and you think what's that all about he says well sickle cell forged my character it made me persistent it gave me empathy it taught me how to get up off the floor so maybe it's useful for my kids to have that maybe they should decide and i thought that's pretty profound but then
i asked him a few months later i said what do you think and he said i think i would edit my kids i don't want them to have sickle cell so what about persistence and empathy he said i'd try to teach them that but i don't want them to feel the pain now the reason i tell this story is not
because there's a right answer but because david in his wisdom had first thought second thoughts third thoughts so to answer your question i have first thoughts of second thoughts i'm now on to my third thoughts and some day will be under my fourth thoughts my book is not about giving the answers i'm going
to hurt the sales of the book by telling you there's no last chapter with the answers but their first second third and fourth thoughts in the book about different types about where we should go maybe we should use it here what about depression what about psychology what about
schizophrenia what about sickle cell what about better athletic abilities and i want the reader to be like me to go hand in hand with me and jennifer doudna and david sanchez having first thought second thoughts thursdays because it's a slippery slope but slippery slopes are a little bit safer if you do it hand
in hand step by step and that's what this book is about so thank you i like that uh one thing that strikes me about this technology is that if there is an advantage to be gained from editing genes not only do we need sort of a national standard but a worldwide standard but it
also pays to defect from that worldwide standard if there is an advantage to be gained if you're a nation and this could be a chance to fast forward your progress to compete on a world level in athletics or in brain power how do you think about the prisoner's dilemma sort of aspect on this well i
think that's why even as we speak there's a summit meeting with the russians and the russians have pushed ahead on chris where putin says we can build better soldiers that way it's why i think that even though the places were going to be competing with russia and this happened at the china
summit in alaska a couple months ago we put on the table biotechnology gene engineering and gene editing as something where we have to have some common uh international understandings and maybe we'll be able to get there or maybe we won't we were able to get there with nuclear
technology we've been able to get there to some extent with cyber technology and this is what we're gonna have to push for it's really interesting and final question uh thank you so much for your time how do you want your work to be remembered you know there are people in the arena
i started early on with a book with a friend called the wise men about the people who created american foreign policy uh right after world war ii and you know they're people like einstein and da vinci and steve jobs and now uh jennifer doudna those are the people who do things
they see the world differently they push the human race forward i know that i'm not one of those people but i have a small role to play which is i tell their stories and i think being able to inspire people with their stories it may not make me certainly don't make me a leonardo da vinci or steve jobs or
ben franklin but there's a role for some of us as i said growing up in louisiana being told don't be a preacher be a storyteller and then if we can tell the stories we can inspire the next generation when she was in middle school jennifer doudna came home one day and found on her bed
the book the double helix by james watson that i mentioned earlier and she read it and she saw rosalind franklin this biochemist in it uh and she said oh i didn't know women could become scientists and she was inspired by rosalind franklin but also by watson and crick and others to say i want to become
a scientist and so she had been thinking i'm going to study french but no she decides she's going to become a chemist she got inspired i hope that someday my books are left on the bed of people's daughters and sons and nieces and nephews and maybe they're inspired to be a steve
jobs to be a jennifer dowden to be a ben franklin even to be a leonardo da vinci and we can help people understand how innovation happens how creativity happens how building great teams happen uh if we can be inspired by the people who are successful in doing it thanks for having me thank you you