Episode 112: Curiosity, Creativity, and the Human Spark of Discovery – A Fireside Chat with Walter Isaacson

Today's episode of Bio from the Bayou is a little bit different from our usual format. We're bringing you a special live recording from Bio on the Bayou, which features a fireside chat with Walter Isaacson, the legendary biographer of innovators such as Steve Jobs, da Vinci, and Jennifer Doudna. And you get to hear me fangirl just a little bit, but we had an amazing conversation about curiosity, resiliency, Ada Lovelace, and the human spark behind discovery. It's a conversation about— It's a conversation about About the heart of science and why wonder still matters.

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Serving the entire Gulf South, but recorded in the heart of New Orleans. You probably well know the man sitting to my left and his incredible work on some of the most innovative science and scientists in our history. So when I was thinking about who I would have talk to a room full of scientists and innovators, I really couldn't think of anyone better than you, Walter, because you have seen the history of scientists and innovators.

Well, thank you, and I love what you're doing. I love what Kimberly is doing. I love— my blood runs green for 4 generations now, so I love what Tulane is doing, and especially the downtown campus.

Well, great. And I'm just going to dive right into it, and the elephant in the room of science has rarely been met with welcoming arms. And throughout history, whether it's the Inquisition and Galileo, or even just some of the challenges of gene editing and AI as it escapes from the stables very rapidly, what patterns have you seen across the history of how scientists have dealt with that?

Let's start with recent history, which is the end of World War II, when Vannevar Bush, as the head of the Science Advisory Council for Roosevelt, writes a piece called Science: The Next Frontier. Unfortunately, he ends up having to— well, not for the science, but Roosevelt dies right when he's supposed to get it. So he meets with Truman and they set out a plan, because the Manhattan Project, as you know, was a government-run lab, whether it was Los Alamos or Oak Ridge and others, that it should be done at research universities. And there should be a 3-legged stool, let's call it, of academic research institutions, federal government funding for pure research and development, including curiosity-driven research, And then corporate ability to commercialize it. And with the Dole-Bayh Act and many others subsequent to that, how you divvied up the proceeds from patents all got settled. Well, that's been, what, 80 years of creating an innovation engine that has rarely been seen before.

Right.

Maybe James Watt doing in 1776, oddly enough, the first steam engine. helps create that revolution. That is under threat right now, this partnership of academics, government, and corporate development. And it's particularly problematic because it would cut back on curiosity-driven basic research.

Right.

In other words, Merck and Novartis and others will fund things that have visible utility to it. But if you want to take the mRNA vaccine, it had to start at the University of Pennsylvania with people figuring out what is messenger RNA and how does it work. Likewise, for my hero— heroine, Jennifer Doudna.

Sure.

She was just curious about why do some bacteria have clustered repeated interspaced sequences they called them CRISPRs. She wasn't looking for a way to edit genes. She was just driven by curiosity. Likewise, Larry Page and Sergey Brin were getting a National Science Foundation grant simply for how do you catalog information, and then eventually you get Google. This engine that has driven American prosperity and probably the greatest technological spurt in history, which is the past 80 years, starting with the computer, the internet, the microchip, the transistor. All of that is done through this process that we may be dismantling now.

Yeah, I love that curiosity. I think when we think of the greatest innovators, we think they're geniuses, but it's not just about intellect. What else do they have?

No, I mean, Leonardo, whom I admire deeply, Wasn't necessarily just the pure intellect of 1500. Even his friend, Luca Pacioli, was, you know, a great mathematician. But Leonardo had a curiosity that was just more powerful. I mean, he had his notebook pages and you can look on them and he would list the things he's curious about, like how do they make the locks to move the water in Flanders?

Yeah.

And one of them was, what does the tongue of a woodpecker look like? Now, nobody wakes up in the morning and says, I have to figure out what— but that's Leonardo. He's like, okay, I'm going to figure that out. Likewise, or I mean, I can name others who are just pure curiosity-driven, Ben Franklin being one. But the other aspect is they're curious about all aspects of creation. In other words, Leonardo, who we think of as a painter, called himself an engineer and artist for the Duke of Milan.

Yeah.

And he is among the dozen people in history who came close to knowing everything you can know about everything that was then knowable. And the fact that he knew botany and anatomy and art and music and math and all helped him see patterns across nature and helped develop his creativity. Likewise with Ben Franklin, who was, you know, a writer, a humanist, a diplomat, but also an inventor. And his electricity experiments are actually not just some dude flying a kite in the rain, but those are real, the most important science experiments of the time. So that ability to be curious across disciplines is important.

So what about as you think about not just the intellect and the curiosity, resiliency, you talked about patterns. What other patterns that you see of people that Don't just give up after hard times or don't give up after an Inquisition.

I guess I'm really resilient. Almost everybody I've written about was sort of a misfit as a child. Leonardo was born out of wedlock. His father doesn't legitimate him. He's left-handed, he's gay, he's distracted.

Yeah.

And he leaves the village of Vinci to go to Florence. And suddenly the Medici think, okay, this guy's got talent. But Ben Franklin, of course, is a runaway. Einstein's growing up Jewish in Germany and has to flee. Same with Kissinger. Steve Jobs is born out of wedlock and gets adopted, readopted by a family then who hadn't finished high school. And Elon Musk, a somewhat autistic, friendless kid in South Africa, just beaten up by all of his schoolmates and abused by his father. So they all have great resilience. I don't think you need to have bad things happen to you to make you resilient, but in some ways it helps. I'm a counterexample because both my parents went to Tulane, all 4 of my grandparents. They were the nicest people I've ever met, the smartest people I've ever met. They were really kind. And I end up being more of an observer of great people than somebody— who's willing to take risks myself.

Well, I like that misfits piece because I think there's a little bit of this archetype of the genius that's, you know, he's a little bit avant-garde, maybe a little bit of a jerk. And I think that we have that sort of— I've worked with those guys that like everyone, they were— he was a little bit of a walking HR violation, but he was a genius. And at the same time, I see worse is that people want to parrot that of the tech bro in the puffy vest.

Oh, I've had people come up to me afterwards and say, hey, you know, I'm just like Steve Jobs.

Oh, God.

And I go, yeah, yeah. Tell me about it. And they say, oh, when somebody does something that's bad, I tell them it's crap. And then I'll find, you know, and if they do something good—

Radical candor, right?

And I said, yeah, yeah. Have you ever invented the iPhone? You don't have the right to be that way. You're not Steve Jobs.

Do you think that we romanticize that to the point of maybe overemphasizing?

Yeah, I think there was a Wired cover story when the Steve Jobs book came out. That was, excuse my language, the COVID line was, do you have to be an asshole?

I was gonna use that instead of jerk, but I stopped myself.

Yeah, yes, exactly. And the answer is no. But in some ways, that's a balance. All you entrepreneurs and people doing great things, you have to figure out, because Steve Jobs said to me something Musk also said almost verbatim. which is you kind of have the luxury of being nice to people. You wear velvet gloves. But I've got to build a company. And if people aren't performing, I don't have time to nurture them and be nice. I just have to deal with it. And Musk even said to me— I once worked at CNN— he said, you were a failure at CNN because you were too nice to people. You should have fired all of them. And then he said, being nice you think it's empathy, but it's actually vanity. Empathy means you want people to like you, and if you really care too much about people liking you, you'll never break enough china in order to do a business. I do not think that is fully true. Jennifer Doudna is one of the nicest people.

Yes.

Ben Franklin, his great role in the founding of our nation was not that he was the passionate, Samuel Adams or his cousin John or the smartest like Jefferson and Madison, but that he was good at bringing people together. So that's an important talent to have. And one more quick thing. If you look at innovation, it's not just how are you supposed to be as a leader, it's how are you supposed to be as a team?

Yeah.

Because innovation is a team sport. It's not about the crazed leader or the sweet leader or anything like that. And so you can take any company. I mean, pick a tech company. Intel.

Yeah.

You have to have a really nice visionary like Bob Noyce. You also have to have some brilliant person like Gordon Moore. But you also need the asshole in some ways who's going to get the chips out the door.

Yeah.

And that's Andy Grove.

Yeah.

And so that 3-person team was actually what made leadership work.

Yeah, you got to have the creamy center to the 2 hard cookies sometimes. So, well, let's talk a little bit about the misfit piece in a different way, and that a lot of the greatest innovations came from being pretty bold, I would say, and your thinking. And sometimes that can be dangerous. I wouldn't— maybe not dangerous, but sometimes it can be reckless. I mean, and as we think of AI even right now, where I mentioned the horse leaving the stable, I mean, it's incredible technology, but it's gotten away a little bit. And how do you make sure that you're balancing innovation and making sure that you're doing it appropriately? And I'm sure Downdes struggled with that.

That is a question as old as humanity, meaning when Prometheus snatches fire from the liver of the gods. And the question is, is he— we know what happens to him. It's not a good fate. And the modern Prometheus, you know, Oppenheimer, the movie American Prometheus, where you snatch nuclear weaponry from the liver of the gods. Our moral processing power as a species tends to have kept up with most technologies, even the atom bomb, I might say, which is obviously— We used it twice, but then there became a consensus on the moral fence we're going to put around nuclear weapons. I'm not sure it'll always hold, but by the way, it's 80 years now. That's pretty— if you had said in 1945 to my dad, who was in the South Pacific with the Navy, all right, they used the bomb, do you think they'll ever use it again? He'll say, oh no, not for another 5 or 10 years. That was pretty amazing. He wouldn't say 80 years from now.

Yeah.

So we can do it. We can put genies back in bottles even. We're doing it well with gene editing at the moment. Jennifer has created with the Chinese, others, international protocols. The places we failed tend to be digital. Social media, we have failed miserably.

Miserably.

It was a technology meant to connect us and it's divided us. AI, we're right on the cusp of figuring it out.

Yeah. Any advice on how to prevent that? How do we look at those things like AI and we look at those things that could get out of hand very, very quickly?

It's very hard to know how to do it with digital technology because you cannot build a bomb in your basement and you can't probably— you could gene edit across the street at the medical school, but it's not something— there's more ability to control Yeah. Somebody in their basement can create bots that could screw up social media and even AI systems. So it will be a lot harder. So I don't actually have an answer to how are we going to prevent AI from being a runaway. One approach, which is sort of what Elon Musk believed until he became a little bit more fanatic on it, was that the closer symbiosis you have between humans and machines, the more you'll have alignment between what the machines do and what humans want. There's some problems with that, one of which may be, well, maybe humans aren't the best thing, you know, maybe what humans want is not all a good thing. But let us assume aligning with human morality is a good thing.

Yeah.

Then I think the best uses of AI will be the ones that most tightly have an interface between humans and machines, including things like Neuralink, which is why Musk is pursuing Neuralink, is let's just have a mind meld between you and your machine. I've started— I teach in the Uptown campus.

Yeah.

And among other things, I mean, I teach the digital revolution, but I also teach biography writing as a seminar. And our class and all the graduates, we've started a little company that will use AI, especially Google Notebook, which allows you to curate the training data, and humans to write biographies of people.

Oh, wow.

And I can even say one of them who's a closer to Lane, Jim Barksdale, who did Netscape. So for a fee, we're writing his biography.

Wow.

Using AI. But it only works if you connect AI to human hands. I mean, one of my students had to talk about dirty work that machines won't do. He had to go to Ole Miss to watch the Ole Miss-LSU game with Jim Barksdale so he could take notes and it could be part of what's in the system to do the biography and interview him while at the game. Another aspect of that is people say AI will destroy jobs. Well, technology has never destroyed jobs. It always increases productivity, which leads to more somethings that we don't even know will exist.

Yeah.

This is a small example, which is at the moment, maybe 1,000 people in America have biographies or memoirs written. But if we create this company, a million can. You can do it for your family. You can do it as a gift to your grandfather to have the biography. So there will be a whole new set of products that we didn't know we all needed. And those products will create jobs for many students of history at Tulane.

Sure.

And I'm convinced that AI will add to the amount of productivity and the amount of stuff we'll have.

Well, and that makes perfect sense. I hadn't thought about that. And like you have through your books, I see you connecting patterns throughout history. And of course, no one— I mean, AI does that all the time. It sees patterns.

You know, the Luddites are the famous people who thought that technology would destroy jobs. And I have a book that nobody read because it was not a biography. It's called The Innovators.

Yeah, I did. I read that.

It's about the people who created the digital revolution. It starts with Ada Lovelace, who creates the concept of the computer algorithm.

Yeah.

And her father is Lord Byron, and he's a Luddite. And I mean that literally. The only speech he gives in the House of Lords is defending the followers of Ned Ludd, who are smashing the weaving machines using punch cards. This is why Ada figures out algorithms in order to weave fabric. And the people smashing the looms think it'll put people in the fabric business out of work.

That's right.

Well, that was 1840, let's say. Within 45 years, the number of people in England in the fabric business is about 2 orders of magnitude greater, 100 times greater, because the looms made it possible. And now it creates all sorts of problems, including the perpetuation of the slave trade in America because they need But what those looms do is makes it so that a wealthy person might have 3 shirts. By the end of that century, even a working-class person would have 20 pieces of clothing. So it creates more products for the wealth that gets created by its productivity. I'm in the minority in believing this too. So if you don't believe me, Larry Summers, all these people smarter than me think, oh no, including Elon Musk, it will destroy jobs.

Yeah. And we see that all the time, that it just— we're not ready. We don't understand what new jobs will be created in this process.

So I once debated this with somebody for a BBC debate, and this person was one of those YouTube influencers and stuff. And he was saying AI is going to destroy all jobs. And he had written a little memoir paper once. And so I read it. And so I get on stage with them and I said, you know, the Luddites, they thought that these looms were people in the fabric business out of work, but it created so much demand for things that some peddler from Płock, Poland came over to England and started peddling fabrics. And then a new technology, basically sewing machines. But his son helped create a fabric business in London that then became a department store, and his son does this, and his great-grandson is now on stage with me as a YouTube influencer. So you do not know what jobs will be happening in the future.

I love that. That's great. Well, and another pattern that we've seen too throughout history is this fear of science too, of the public, of not them pushing back, but worse, being scared of science. And we see that now. Obviously, I'm a microbiologist by training, and I remember arguing on CNN.com as a graduate student back in the day was someone's like, I can't believe someone doesn't believe in vaccines. And if you had told me what would happen nowadays, I would be shocked. I might have quit. I don't know. How do we as scientists— but at the same time, I think that we have lost the public's trust. And how do scientists recreate that trust?

Yes. And it's easy for me to sit here and maybe get some nodding heads. by blaming the public and blaming social media and blaming the Bobby Kennedys of this world. But let me switch it and blame people in the science community.

I agree. I totally agree.

Because people in the science community used to be good communicators. And when I was growing up, I read Isaac Asimov's not only the novels, but his book on the atom and his book on— I mean, I learned the periodic table from Bill Nye the Science Guy and all that. Scientists were not part of a priesthood who looked down on everybody. They were very good at communicating. One reason I've had the chance to do the books I've had, whether it's Einstein or Jennifer Doudna or others, is because there's a hunger for people to read about Einstein.

Yes.

But no physicist— I mean, they don't. So it leaves it to people like me. I get to say, hey, don't be afraid of atomic power.

Yeah.

Here's how it works. Or don't be afraid of CRISPR. It's actually just a guide with a little piece of RNA, and it doesn't even go into— with mRNA, doesn't even go into the nucleus of your cell. And if you make it fascinating, and if you start with Darwin looking at the beaks of the finches and Mendel Figuring out how to breed peas and you explain what a gene is and then a chromosome. People— I mean, it's always been thus. It's just more pronounced in the era of social media. Yeah, but growing up, you probably knew people who were against GMOs.

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Right.

They went to that organic part of the Ralphs or Langenstein's and it's like, okay, I could see you're against GMO. Do you know What a gene is? Yeah. Do you know how you modify it? Do you know how it works? And I think if you're going to have a strong opinion about vaccines, it's useful to know what Jenner did, to know what—

Yeah.

Kati Karikó did. Same with genetically modified foods. It's interesting to know, okay, what does that mean? And so I think we have to communicate science better, which is why I like writing these books.

Yeah. Well, and I was researching for my own— I was thinking through the modern scientists and pitching it to graduate students of what the modern scientists looked like. But you go back through history and they have these incredible auditoriums filled with the public and putting science on display, and it was something for people to attend.

There was an age of wonder that happened from 1840, right when Ada Lovelace, despite her Luddite dad who goes off to Greece and gets himself killed, so he's out of the picture, But she's with Babbage and others, and there's cabinets of curiosity and things of wonder. And we need to get back to that.

That's the piece. So how do we have the cabinet of— I mean, I have one in my house. I mean, I own an otter paw brooch from Scotland, but I'm a little bit different. But how do we create that wonder in a digital age? How do we create that and bringing people together of looking at science beyond the hallowed halls?

You know, we have 2 great institutions here.

Absolutely.

The Insectarium And the aquarium, and for that matter, the Audubon Zoo, that are very good and actually have— I know Zach Lemon, he's in charge of the science of the insects. And if you just ask him, he'll let you eat some of the insects in the insectarium.

Nope.

He'll explain why. The answer is yeah. But good protein.

Yeah, protein always.

But so I don't fully know I think we got— and this is why I wrote Einstein— you would be considered a lot— not just a lot, you'd be considered a Philistine in the era of Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin if you didn't know some science and like botany and figured out seashells and understood Newton's forces and even electricity. Einstein comes along, and I don't blame him for it, Suddenly, science becomes intimidating. It's no longer— anybody can understand equal and opposite forces and force and mass and acceleration. You can learn that in grade school. But relativity and quantum made it so difficult. I think that's when people became intimidated by science. And I wanted to demystify it by saying, no, this was a patent clerk who's trying to synchronize clocks when he understands that maybe time is different depending on your state of motion.

I met this sweet graduate student last week, and she talked about the difference of night science and day science. And day science is what you do during the day, and it's all buttoned up in your lab coat, and it's— you can't say anything wrong, and you have your hypothesis. And then there's night science, and you can speak the crazy hypothesis out loud and make sure that people are comfortable asking the crazy questions and being curious and having those conversations and making science more approachable, even to scientists.

I blame it too on the humanities folks, which I put myself in that category.

I was like, that's you!

Which is, I don't know any scientists— maybe it's true of some of you— who, if you said, who's your favorite musician, or do you think Picasso's any good, wouldn't be able to have some opinions and conversation.

Sure.

But you ask And a humanist would be appalled if somebody didn't know the difference between Picasso and Leonardo.

Yeah.

But then you ask a humanist, what's the difference between an integral and a differential equation? What's the difference between a gene and the chromosome? Oh, I don't do math. Oh, I don't do science. Well, you shouldn't be allowed to say that, and you shouldn't be allowed to have your kids think, oh, you don't do it. So it's up to parents in my group of friends, meaning the type who tend to be humanists, to say, wait, I can learn math and I can make sure I take my kids not just to baseball games, but to insectariums.

Yeah, I like that because, I mean, heck, I was a piano performance major. And if you told me then that I would be on stage, not on a piano, but talking to you, I would have laughed, laughed, laughed.

You know, a lot of the great scientists, including Einstein, were music— I mean, he played violin probably a little better than people think. And yeah, so it does help to— as Leonardo, who invented the harpsichord and many other things, a musician, he gets sent when he's finally trying to escape Florence because he hasn't finished 3 of his paintings and they've already paid for them.

Oops.

He writes to the Duke of Milan. He says, I can make weapons of war, but I also make beautiful musical instruments I can bring to you. And then the bottom line in the 11-paragraph letter is, I can also paint.

So then what do you think, what type of job do you think Leonardo would have today then?

I think people used to come to Tulane. I've been teaching maybe 5 or 6 years, and you'd hear parents say, I'm not sure I want them to major in history. I want them to do coding so they'll have a job. Well, guess what? AI and technologies disrupt jobs, and you do not know which job is going to be disrupted. And at the moment, Coding is one of those jobs that I've got. I spent this afternoon with a couple of my computer science students lamenting, I don't have a job, I don't have any offers. So what Leonardo would do is if you are interested in everything, it's more likely that when the disruption happens, you'll land on your feet.

Well, and speaking of new things, you have a new book coming out, I think in November.

And it's in 2 weeks, I think.

Oh, it's coming out so soon. So available on Amazon, if I remember.

At the end of October.

Yeah. Yeah, and it's titled The Greatest Sentence, and it's a really good sentence and one that I think that we all need to be reminded of. So tell us about it.

Fortunately, it's a very short book.

I know, I was like, I have it written down, I guess.

It's like 45 pages. The greatest sentence ever written is about, we hold these truths to be self-evident. And we're about to have the 250th birthday.

Yep.

We're not in the mood to celebrate a birthday. Our country is so fractured and It's like, oh my God, I have to have Thanksgiving with my relatives who voted this way or something. So we're not in the mood. And it's like, I want— and I'm doing it with a lot of my friends in the history trade like Meacham and others.

Yeah.

We want to do a, hey, for one year, let's all try to get along and rally around things we can agree on. So I parse that sentence. I think it's 21 words. And I have the 4 drafts that are done. Jefferson begins the first draft, we hold these truths to be sacred. Franklin takes his black printer's pen, crosses it out, and puts self-evident. And as a scientist, you'll be happy to know, it's because he had just come back from Scotland where he was staying with David Hume, who had come up with the concept of self-evident truths, truths by reason. versus truths by empirical data. And Franklin is saying, no, these are— and I want people to understand that sentence layer after. What do they mean by all men? What do they mean by created equal? Why did life, liberty, and property get life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?

Mm-hmm.

And so I hope in 40 pages I can say, man, this sentence has a lot of cool things. And whatever you feel, it's our common ground. So let's all just read it. Let's memorize it and try to get along for a year.

And collaborate. And that's where we get the innovation.

But by the way, I don't know if you know, I'm doing my next book, the one I've been working on for 4 years, which is perfect for you.

Okay, tell me.

Marie Curie. I get to go to Paris. I'm going through her notebooks, figuring out how she turned chemistry into physics.

Wow.

That the nucleus actually matters. And it's a whole lot of fun because if you ever want to make— I hope I've made, with Einstein, the concepts of some physics vaguely understandable.

That's why I read it. I honestly failed physics, barely, and I barely passed. And so I read it because of that.

And likewise with Doudna, I hope I've made it so that biochemistry, you can now get it. And with Jobs and Musk, figure out What is— why is it called digital?

Yeah.

Why is it binary? Could it have been a base-10 system of digital? Well, it's on/off switches and transistors. So I'm trying to explain that. The one thing that hasn't been fully explained and is the most miraculous sort of roadmap of science is chemistry. And even today in my classroom where I'm teaching American history, it was in a classroom that had the periodic table on it.

Oh, really?

And that periodic table is so amazing. And of course, Mendeleev ends up being a teacher in a way of Marie Curie, who then figures out, all right, I'm going to discover new elements and fit in that chart.

Wow. Well, and to me, some of the greatest science feels like magic. And that's, I think, the way that you have to think about it in so many ways.

It was somebody's great line. Somebody modern, like, not famous, but like Stewart Brand, who said any great technology is indistinguishable from magic. But by the way, if you want magic, figure out the periodic table.

Yeah, exactly. It's magical. Yeah, yeah. I'm still not convinced quantum theory is magic.

And you see, if you're going to get people to love science, you have to have it— in this room, everybody's nodding, but in most rooms, if I said, hey, the periodic table is magical, everybody would think I'd be kidding. Well, We have to toil to make sure people understand the magic and beauty of science.

And that's what I would say to everyone in the audience here, of like, let's find a way to connect people. I mean, we think science is really cool, but it's important that others see it as cool too. And no greater man than Walter to help you with that piece of this. But I mean, check out, if you haven't read any of his books, they're amazing. I really did read Einstein because I struggled with his concepts, and so it was really great to see the background and the stories behind those concepts.

The good news about the Einstein book is at the end, he still doesn't understand quantum mechanics. And I actually believe that if you understand quantum mechanics, you don't get it.

You don't get it. Yeah.

Yeah.

So I didn't have to crack the code on the quanta. Well, the pesky quanta, as he called it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I felt like, oh, well, if he didn't get it, okay.

Yeah, exactly.

A little bit better. Well, thank you so much for sharing your words.

A lot of fun.

Yes. Thank you. And join me in thanking Walter for his time today.

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