Prediction Not checkable as stated
Isaacson: Commercialized gene enhancements will encode societal inequalities into human biology
“What about allowing rich people to buy better memory for their kids, but since this technology is not going to be free, it'll encode the inequalities of our society into our species.”
Assertion Supported
Isaacson: Feng Zhang Beat Doudna's Team by Two Weeks to Human CRISPR Patents
“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.
It's a race that …”
Insight
Isaacson: Smart People Are Common and Usually Do Not Amount to Much
“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”
Opinion
Isaacson: Microsoft Teams signals a horrible, user-unfriendly experience
“You look at I don't know. Microsoft teams. It like says it imputes this is going to be a horrible experience. I'm not user friendly with you.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Elizabeth Holmes told Isaacson she used his Steve Jobs biography as a how-to book
“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 invented Theranos launch Theranos. Say, oh, I use your Steve Jobs as a how-to book.”
Insight
Isaacson: Brutal intellectual honesty prevents teams from accumulating B players
“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 f…”
Insight
Isaacson: Creative breakthroughs require dense face-to-face collaboration before dispersing
“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 d…”
Assertion Supported
Isaacson: Josiah Zayner Sells CRISPR Materials Online Through The Odin
“Josiah Zainer,
Runs a store called the Odin, and you can go online and get CRISPR and use CRISPR maybe to regulate the myostatin, so you'll have bigger muscles, things like that.”
Insight
Isaacson: Focusing on product over profit is what makes profits follow
“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 a disaster. He said, i…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Isaacson: Elon Musk avoids material status and is divesting houses
“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.”
Insight
Isaacson: Innovation hubs decline when tolerance faces reactionary backlashes
“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 ag…”
Opinion
Isaacson: Da Vinci and Franklin Succeeded Through Curiosity, Not Peerless Intellectual Power
“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 wha…”
Assertion Contradicted
Isaacson: Steve Jobs delayed original Mac launch over circuit board aesthetics
“Something that he shared with Steve jobs who would hold up shipping the original Macintosh because the circuit board inside was not beautiful enough.”
Opinion
Isaacson: Da Vinci abandoned conceptual projects when execution risked imperfection
“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 could hit out of the park, he just left it at the conceptual stage.”
Insight
Isaacson: Leonardo da Vinci's curiosity was driven by delight, not utility
“Leonardo da Vinci's curiosity was driven not because there was some utility to it, but because it delighted him.”
Assertion Partly supported
Isaacson: Ada Lovelace wrote the first algorithm and conceived general computing
“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”
Insight
Isaacson: Innovators should avoid early specialization and maintain broad curiosity
“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.”
Insight
Isaacson: People Open Up When Interviewers Simply Listen Without Guiding
“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.”
Insight
Isaacson: Using silence in interviews forces reluctant subjects to open up
“If sometimes they don't answer my question, I just stay there and listen, and I'm silent, they gotta fill the silence, and they talk.”
Insight
Isaacson: Obsessive passion for details is a foundational key to creativity
“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 o…”
Assertion Partly supported
Isaacson: Steve Jobs engraved 30 engineers' signatures inside Macintosh case
“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.”
Disclosure
Isaacson: Avoiding brutal feedback was my key failing leading CNN and Time
“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.”
Assertion Supported
Isaacson: Jobs designed Pixar and Apple headquarters to force serendipitous encounters
“Steve Jobs who designed the Pixar headquarters to make sure Everybody had to walk through the atrium and pump into people and exchange ideas to the Apple headquarters.”
Assertion Supported
Isaacson: Boston has highest density of research hospitals worldwide
“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, inch for inch than any other place in the world.”
Walter Isaacson