The Exchanges

Q And that was through the, the painstaking addition of microscopic sort of brushstrokes over years and years and years to create that effect. Is that correct?

A Absolutely. The more layers, sheer, thin layers of, uh, his painting, his brush strokes, uh, because he understands how light diffracts, how it hits our eye, that if it hits the center of our eye, you see more detail. If it's the corner of our 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 as 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.

AI assessment note: “Absolutely. The more layers, sheer, thin layers of, uh, his painting”

Q 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.

A Right. They were great competitors and the, uh, elders of Florence took, uh, Made use of that by commissioning them to do works on opposite sides of the big hall, the big room in the town hall building, and Leonardo was gonna do a Battle of Angiari painting And, uh, Michelangelo was doing another battle painting, and there they were, almost as if it were, you know, a, uh, 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, Uh, 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.

AI assessment note: “they both quit before they finish. It's almost as if the competition drove them forward”

Q him. We talk about Da Vinci and how he wasn't born with a brilliant mind, but developed one. We talk about Ada Loveless and how she developed the algorithm, and then we talk about gene editing. It's time to listen and learn. Let's start at the beginning. You started writing about Ben Franklin and then Einstein and then Steve Jobs and then Da Vinci. What made these lives worth exploring?

A 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, and 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 at 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.

AI assessment note: “The real key was being creative... I've been interested in creative thinkers.”

Q 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?

A 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, uh, energy, uh, 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 like, and so that dispersal happened because of the pandemic. I think they also found that in places like that, where there are great research universities like Tulane, or great Medical centers. Uh, 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…

AI assessment note: “It's sort of big bangs coming out of intense places... but then dispersing.”

Q I think that's a really good lesson. 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?

A You know, Sal Kahn, who does Kahn 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. I figured, okay, I can easily learn what, uh, RNA does as a messenger inside a human cell, uh, 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. Uh, 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 Greene 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 we'll take the time, sometimes a year or so, to drill deep i…

AI assessment note: “take the time, sometimes a year or so, to drill deep into a subject”

Q 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 Jobs' key doctrines. What does impute mean, and how did it play in?

A 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 they are 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 four 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.

AI assessment note: “impute means what does something signal when you first see it? What does it imply?”

Q 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 hypothesis on why they tend to burn out?

A Well, they tend to burn out sometimes when the tolerance and the diversity that distinguished, say, Florence in the 14 seventies get hit by a Savonarola 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. Uh, we had happened in this country. Uh, and over the past four or five years, it's happened, uh, 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 a 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, 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, Boston, of course, with the huge boom in biotech, but even in small places like Chattanooga or Cleveland, Mississippi, places with good colleges or universities where there's …

AI assessment note: “they tend to burn out sometimes when the tolerance and the diversity... get hit”

Q a mind like Newton that just has so much more horsepower than we have 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?

A 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, uh, 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 Intellectual firepower people of their time. Leonardo. Probably not as great of a, you know, intellectual as Luca 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 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 Rayleigh's formula for the diffraction method. Of the spectrum of light, all trying to figure out why the sky is blue. Now,…

AI assessment note: “what Leonardo da Vinci had... was an insatiable curiosity”

Q That's so cool. What was the thing that surprised you the most about da Vinci through your study of him?

A I think, uh, 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 of perspective in order to get the adoration of the Magi correct. Uh, but then after a while, he's dissecting cadavers, you know, to study the muscles and the skeleton, 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. Uh, 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.

AI assessment note: “what surprised me was that Leonardo da Vinci's curiosity was driven not because there was”

Q And this wasn't appreciated until later with Alan Turing, right? Or was it, was she appreciated in her time, or was it her Lady Lovelace's?

A Well, she was a very complex figure in her time, and 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, Uh, painful life, opium, trying to kill the pain, 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 things. 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 paper called Can 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 Turing 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…

AI assessment note: “she was not a great figure of history, but she did lay down the idea”

Q 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 the secondary, third, fourth order sources?

A 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's a great technology for the storage and retrieval of information. It has A battery life that's almost infinite. It, uh, operating system never goes out, so I can go around the world and look at Leonardo's notebook and not only sort of read in a second-hand 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 Caltech, 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.

AI assessment note: “I think there's something inspiring, too. About seeing the original physical product.”

Q Let's come to CRISPR and gene editing. What is CRISPR, and what is gene editing?

A 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, CRISPR is a tool where you can edit them out. And 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, uh, sequences known as CRISPRs in their own genetic code, and that comes from having to fight off viruses. They take a mugshot 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.

AI assessment note: “CRISPR is just a pretty simple tool that we can reprogram. To cut our own DNA.”

Q to continue on the thread 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 microboard, 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?

A When Steve was young, he and his father built a fence around the backyard in their house, and 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, uh, 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 whiteboard 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 re…

AI assessment note: “That made them into real artists.”

Q 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?

A Well, intellectual honesty is something that can push people, make people a great leader. It's something that I've been a manager. I've run companies. I know that being really brutal and intellectually honest 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, uh, as perhaps a stronger manager would have been. Uh, but after a while, I realized, all right, I got to play to the strengths I have. I look at somebody like Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates, people who've run great companies. I look at how a 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 bac…

AI assessment note: “everybody's got their style, but my style is I like collegiality and collaboration”

Q Are there any areas where you disagree with them?

A 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 a little tube of blood. Because he's a seventeen-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 Porteus, 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 sickles. I said, what about persistence and empathy? He said, I'd try to teach them that, but I don't want them to fill the pain. …

AI assessment note: “I'll tell you the story not about me, but about a wonderful ethicist”

Q Jobs is famous for his intensity. Where did that come from? And how did he manage to avoid complacency?

A 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 you 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.

AI assessment note: “I see it in a lot of people I've written about.”