♪ ♪ (theme music plays) RUBENSTEIN: I'm at the Tisch WNET Studios today with Walter Isaacson.

Walter thank you very much for coming here.

We are gonna talk about Walter's most recent book on Leonardo Da Vinci.

Now Walter, I'd like you to tell people about your background because, uh, you have written books, about people who are polymaths, geniuses, Renaissance men.

So you're obviously attracted to them, but there are some people who say that maybe you are a genius polymath or Renaissance man.

So, let's talk about why some people might say that.

Let's talk about your background.

You grew up in New Orleans?

ISAACSON: Yeah and the person who's the polymath, who loved everything from engineering to art and music was my father and he lived Einstein, he was an electrical engineer.

But he also was a humanist and that, so in some ways, uh, I think it was Emerson said all biography is autobiography.

In some ways I keep trying to please my father.

RUBENSTEIN: Okay.

Well let's talk about your father for a moment.

Um, he got you interested in kind of technical kits and tech kits and... ISAACSON: Hm.

RUBENSTEIN: These kinda things so many people think of you as a great writer.

But you actually were a tech nerd when you were a little boy?

ISAACSON: Yeah and I think my father was still disappointed that I never became an engineer.

But what we would do in the basement was, you know, we had transistors and resistors and circuit boards and soldering irons and we'd make ham radios.

And it was kinda fun to know exactly how a circuit works, on/off switches work.

And that's what we did in the basement of our house in New Orleans.

RUBENSTEIN: So, you must've done pretty well in high school.

You got into Harvard.

But you not only got into Harvard but you must've done pretty well there because you were a Rhodes Scholar.

There are only 32 picked every year at the United States so.

You ultimately became a journalist with "Time Magazine" and you rose up to be the editor of "Time Magazine".

So, after "Time", you became the head of CNN, is that right?

You moved to Atlanta to do that?

ISAACSON: Mm-hmm.

RUBENSTEIN: And then you became the head of the Aspen Institute.

And you've also been teaching off and on at Tulane... And you've done things at Harvard.

You've been at the Harvard Board of Overseers.

But the most amazing thing about your polymath career, I would say is, while you were running the Aspen Institute, which is a full-time job, you're writing biographies of other people.

Now that would be a full-time job for most people.

How did you write biographies of Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, Leonardo, while you're running Aspen?

ISAACSON: Well everybody I think has hobbies or passion.

I always try to puzzle how people can find so much time say to play golf or go fishing.

Both of which I like but for me, I was just talking to Ron Chernow, I know he's been one of your guests as well, it's like we love writing so much that we sort of miss it when we have to do something else for a weekend.

RUBENSTEIN: Let's talk about the first book you wrote, um, as a solo author and that was on Henry Kissinger.

Did you know him from your Harvard days?

ISAACSON: Uh, no, I mainly knew him from "Time Magazine" and everybody who had written about Henry Kissinger had either done incredibly, you know, hagi, hagiography, you know, favorable books or were slamming him.

And so I wanted to just see if I could do a down the, uh, middle book about Henry Kissinger.

RUBENSTEIN: Did he like your book?

ISAACSON: No, no, he said he liked to title though.

RUBENSTEIN: Okay, which was?

ISAACSON: "Kissinger".

RUBENSTEIN: Okay.

ISAACSON: When we had a party of everybody who'd been on "Time Magazine's" cover at one point, Kissinger was invited and I said to myself 'cause I was editor, I wonder if he'll come 'cause he was a little... and the phone rings and it's, uh, Dr. Kissinger and he said, "Well, Walter, even the 30 years' war had to end at some point.

I will come."

RUBENSTEIN: How did he actually become Nixon's National Security Advisor because he had been Nelson Rockefeller's advisor and Rockefeller and Nixon weren't too close?

ISAACSON: And even more so he had helped Hubert Humphrey who had run against Nixon and he'd been helping both sides during the Paris Peace talks in 1968.

He, like a moth to flame, was attracted to power, which hurts him and singes him when he's so attracted to Richard Nixon for a while.

But it also allows him to become National Security Advisor and then Secretary of State.

RUBENSTEIN: Perhaps one of the most significant things that happened post World War II in the diplomatic world was the opening to China.

Whose idea was that?

Henry Kissinger's, Richard Nixon's, combination?

ISAACSON: I think mainly Richard Nixon.

He writes a piece for "Foreign Affair's" magazine well before he's president talking about it, and I think Kissinger got it right away, especially when Kissinger becomes National Security Advisor.

And what Kissinger does is not just do the opening to China for its own sake, he does it in order to create a balance of power with Russia, or the Soviet Union as it then was, and he knows that he can create this triangular balance.

So, he takes Nixon's idea and puts it into a strategic framework.

RUBENSTEIN: Now at one point Henry Kissinger is the National Security Advisor... And when William Rogers resigns as Secretary of State, Kissinger becomes a Secretary of State as well.

He's the only person to be both positions at the same time.

How did that work?

ISAACSON: Well it worked very well because you always have, as you know from your days whatever, where you have a Cy Vance and a Brzezinski or whatever the national security advisor is always at logger heads with the secretary of state but in this case they were both Henry Kissinger so he and himself got along very well.

He was very upset when Gerald Ford finally decides to cleave the positions apart.

RUBENSTEIN: Well, let's talk about somebody you wrote about after Henry Kissinger.

Benjamin Franklin was, uh, unlike Henry Kissinger.

He didn't go to Harvard.

Uh, Benjamin Franklin didn't actually go to any school, did he?

ISAACSON: No because he was, uh, the, the 10th son of a Puritan immigrant.

He's gonna be tied to the Lord.

He was gonna study to be a minister and they were gonna send him to Harvard but he was not cut for the ministry and so he kind of runs away as you know, goes to Philadelphia.

But he did, uh, does come out of Kissinger because I was so interested in this balance of power diplomacy that Kissinger did and I realized that Franklin had invented that during the Revolution, balancing the Bourbon Pact Nations and England and us.

RUBENSTEIN: So, he is said to have created the University of Pennsylvania.

ISAACSON: Correct.

RUBENSTEIN: The library company in Philadelphia.

ISAACSON: Right.

RUBENSTEIN: The fire department in Philadelphia.

ISAACSON: Mm-hmm.

RUBENSTEIN: Uh, invented the stove, the, uh, Franklin stove.

Bifocals.

ISAACSON: Mm-hmm.

RUBENSTEIN: Discovered electricity.

Is all those things possible for one person?

ISAACSON: Yes and he was that type of person we've been talking about, a polymath, who believed that you should study the flows of water as well as the flows of history.

So he discovers and charts the Gulf Stream, he understands the positive and negative forces, that's the name he gives electricity.

He understands that it's a flow.

Positive, negative and the balances.

And that you even see reflected in the Constitution and other great documents, that enlightenment balance idea.

So his ability to do things like the electricity experiments while he's also doing the Albany plan for Union, I think it shows what a polymath can do when you see patterns across nature.

RUBENSTEIN: He invents the lightning rod, is that right?

ISAACSON: Yes, an incredibly important invention at the time.

RUBENSTEIN: Why is, why was that so important?

ISAACSON: Because people didn't know what lightning was and it was massively destructive.

He flies that kite in the rain which is, you know, sort of the scene we have of him when we're school kids, and that was a very important experi, experiment drawing down the charge from a cloud to show that you could defuse lightning.

RUBENSTEIN: He also, uh, invents to postal system of the United States.

He's the first, matter of fact, postmaster general.

ISAACSON: Hm.

Mm-hmm.

RUBENSTEIN: But he didn't really run the system so much.

He got somebody else to run it.

ISAACSON: Well, his wife, uh, does it but it's an important thing because it helped unify the colonies.

Up until then we had to send letters back and forth to London if you wanted to send one from Pennsylvania to South Carolina, and he creates the postal road.

He's also the first media mogul 'cause he's got his print shop, he's got Poor Richard's almanac, he's got his newspapers.

He sets up his apprentices and cousins in various places and then connects 'em with the postal system.

And for the first year he, you know, you talk about net neutrality, he favored the content of his own shops and finally he said, "No we have to make it neutral so anybody can send something through the postal system."

RUBENSTEIN: Now he was the person who signed the Declaration of Independence.

ISAACSON: Mm-hmm.

RUBENSTEIN: He signed the Constitution, he signed the Treaty of Paris that ended the Revolutionary War.

Um, he actually he spent a lot of time in Europe as it turns out.

ISAACSON: Mm-hmm.

RUBENSTEIN: Uh, a lot of time in England, a lot of time in France.

Why was he so popular in those countries and was he at that time the most well-known American?

ISAACSON: Absolutely, and partly it was the electricity experiments 'cause when he does those experiments with the kite they actually fully prove it in France for the first time.

So when he gets to France as our envoy in 1776 right after he's done with, with the Declaration... RUBENSTEIN: Hm.

ISAACSON: People line up on the streets to see the old Ben Franklin carried on the Chaise lounge to meet Voltaire on the steps of the Academy.

RUBENSTEIN: So, at the Constitutional Convention he's there as the grand old man.

He's in his 80's, he can barely walk.

Did he have any impact on the Constitution as it was drafted?

ISAACSON: Yes.

Uh, you know, he's twice as old as the average age of the other members but his view was that they had to come together and compromise.

And so Franklin at the very end of this long, hot summer sorta proposes that they have a senate that's equal votes per state and a house.

RUBENSTEIN: Right.

ISAACSON: And he says, "When we were young tradesmen and we had a joint that didn't hold together we'd shave from one side and take from the other until we had something that would hold together for centuries.

And so too here we at this convention must each part with some of our demands."

And his great lesson, which we've forgotten today I fear in Washington, is that compromisers may not make great heroes but they do make great democracies.

RUBENSTEIN: Well, let's talk about another genius you wrote about uh, Albert Einstein is generally considered to be the ultimate genius.

When you use the word Genius, people say Albert Einstein.

When he was a young boy the conventional wisdom is that he wasn't such a good student.

Is that true?

ISAACSON: Yeah.

He was slow in learning how to talk, so slow that his family consulted doctor and they called him the dopey one in the family.

And he also, uh, was very rebellious.

He just wouldn't rote, memorize things.

He thought in pictures not in rote memorization or words.

So even as he's looking at a compass his dad gives him when he's six years old he's trying to visualize a force field and of course for his entire life he's able to visualize how force fields interact with matter.

And he said you have to marvel because you and I remember getting compasses when we were kids right?

And we go, well look it points North and you try to point ... and then we're like oh look a dead squirrel and we're on to something else.

Until his death bed he's still trying to figure out how does a force field make a piece of matter twitch and move.

RUBENSTEIN: So, he ultimately, um, gets a PhD.

ISAACSON: Finally yeah.

RUBENSTEIN: But unlike many people who got a PhD in those days in Germany he couldn't get a job.

Why not?

ISAACSON: Well because you know, he's trying to get a job even teaching a high school and people can't quite figure out what he's on about.

Takes him a while to get the PhD 'cause in 1905 he writes famously, you know, four major papers.

And the simplest of the papers is the one he finally does his third attempt to get a PhD dissertation accepted.

The other two papers came up with quantum theory and relativity.

RUBENSTEIN: Let's talk about the year 1905.

That's the famous year when he wrote these papers you mentioned.

Uh.

And he's a, he's a patent clerk in Switzerland.

How does he have time to write the papers that change with world while he's a patent clerk?

ISAACSON: Well I don't think he had TV to watch or anything else.

RUBENSTEIN: Okay.

ISAACSON: And he's sitting there, you know, in the patent office with only his friend Michele Besso.

They're bouncing around ideas but one of the things that they're looking at is these devices to synchronize clocks.

And if you're going to synchronize a clock you gotta send a light signal... Or something that travels at the speed of light and Einstein's saying well if you're traveling really fast to one of the clocks it won't look synchronized as if you're traveling really fast the other direction.

And so he makes just a mental leap, well I get it the speed of light is constant but time is relative depending on your state of motion.

RUBENSTEIN: So what does E=MC squared mean and why is that the most famous kind of algebra formula?

ISAACSON: It comes from the 1905 papers but it's almost an addendum he does after that summer of 1905 when he's looking back at the papers and he realizes that there is an equivalent between energy, which is the E, and mass.

And that the equivalence is related to the speed of light squared.

And so what that does is that it explains that energy and mass are not totally two separate things but are related in the universe and that if you take a tiny piece of mass you can become an atom bomb and have huge amounts of energy.

RUBENSTEIN: So ultimately because of anti-Semitism, the rise of Hitler, um, he feels he needs to leave Europe and Germany and he comes to the United States.

Ultimately he goes to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and from the time he was in the United States to the time he died I think 1955, did he actually do anything scientifically significant or his work had already been done much earlier?

ISAACSON: Yeah he said that the good Lord punished him for his contempt for authority by turning him into an authority.

So he gets too whetted to the old physics that he had invented, relativity and quantum theory, and he resists until his death bed this notion that there's an uncertainty, a randomness at the, uh, subatomic level because of his own theory, quantum theory.

And so he makes no great scientific advance.

He keeps trying to get a unified theory that will sort of overcome this uncertainty.

RUBENSTEIN: Unified theory would explain how the universe really works, that nobody... ISAACSON: Yeah it would tie together everything from the, you know, how electromagnet waves work to particles, to everything, gravity, all of the forces of nature would be put into a unified field theory.

We still haven't gotten it.

RUBENSTEIN: Now when he died.

What happened to Einstein's brain and is there any evidence that that brain was different than anybody else's brain?

ISAACSON: So this guy who does the autopsy takes the brain and puts it in a cooler and drives around with it and gives slices of it to scientists around to try to figure out about Einstein's brain.

It's a, I have it at the end of my book.

There's a whole section on it 'cause it's really a weird thing.

No.

There was not much of anything anybody ever discovered physiological... RUBENSTEIN: Right.

ISAACSON: You know, that made his brain... RUBENSTEIN: Okay.

ISAACSON: Fundamentally different from yours or mine.

RUBENSTEIN: Okay.

So let's talk about another genius that you wrote a book about after that and that was Steve Jobs.

ISAACSON: Mm-hmm.

RUBENSTEIN: How did you come to write a book about Steve Jobs?

Did he say I wanted a book written about me or did you just vol, decide to do it your own?

ISAACSON: Well I had, uh, run into him, uh, when I was editor of "Time" and even before that.

And so after I went to the Aspen Institute, uh, he gave me a call and I talked to him.

I said come on out.

He said, well I wanna take a walk with you.

You've done Ben Franklin, you've done Einstein.

I want you to do me next.

My first reaction was, you know, well okay.

But I said well let's wait for 20, 30, 40 years 'til you retire.

And then I was told well if you're gonna do Steve you ought to do it now.

And of course for me this was a, a, just a fantastic project because he had just transformed so many industries from personal computing to music to publishing to retail stores to digital animation.

And to be able to get up close to the most creative person of my generation was a real honor.

RUBENSTEIN: So, did he invent the personal computer with his partner Steve Wozniak?

ISAACSON: He invented the ability to take a computer out of a box and plug it in so that, you know, with the Apple II it just became simple.

It was a computer for the rest of us.

RUBENSTEIN: So, he started the company and he took the company public and he made a great deal of money by the standards of those days, certainly hundreds of millions of dollars, very wealthy.

And then ultimately he recruits somebody to be the, um, president of the company, John Sculley from Pepsi, and then ultimately he manages to get pushed out of his own company.

How did that happen?

ISAACSON: He was such a perfectionist, Steve Jobs was, for the product.

Especially for the Macintosh which comes out in 1984.

And he wants the Macintosh to be absolutely beautiful, even the circuit board inside has gotta be beautiful.

And so he spends a lot of money, he doesn't want it to be priced very high.

Sculley overprices it, first couple a years it didn't sell very well and he was just very difficult to deal with and finally the board pushes him out.

RUBENSTEIN: What was the, um, fascination he had with style?

Why was it so important to his type of genius?

ISAACSON: He understood something that most geniuses understand.

It's a simple concept.

Beauty matters.

And so when he does the original Macintosh he wants every curve on the chamfers of the case, he wants the pixels on the graphical interface to be beautiful.

And so he invents the iPod eventually.

Whereas Bill Gates, born the same year, a true electronics genius creates the Zune.

And he was that understanding that Steve Jobs had, that beauty, that design was not just a surface thing but it's what emotionally connected us to things.

RUBENSTEIN: Now Apple has been one of the most successful companies in the history of the world.

ISAACSON: Mm-hmm.

RUBENSTEIN: In part not only because of the computer and not only because of the iPod because in the end because of the iPhone.

Uh, was Steve the inventor of the iPhone as well?

ISAACSON: Yeah.

Steve was the person when they bring him back at the end of the 1990s having eased him out in 1985 I think, uh, he, they have to bring him back 'cause the company is declining and he gets the Macintosh and everything back in shape.

And then he says, okay and they invent the iPod, then the iPhone and the iPad.

And what he wants to do is to have a computer that is also a music player that's also a personal digital assistant and he comes up with a whole concept of making this into an object that's simply to use, you don't need a manual and it does everything.

RUBENSTEIN: So, you know Bill Gates and you knew, um, Steve Jobs.

How will you compare their levels of genius in terms of quality and the different types of way their brains worked?

ISAACSON: Bill Gates had a much, much higher mental processing power.

Uh, you know you could watch him with two computer screens, each with four windows open as he processed data and would do things.

He is deeply analytic and very, very good at just mentally processing things.

Steve Jobs did not have that mental processing power discipline but he had an intuitive feel for both what would work emotionally.

RUBENSTEIN: So let's talk about another genius, um, Leonardo.

Somebody could... ISAACSON: It culminates with the "Leonardo".

RUBENSTEIN: Uh, this book "Leonardo", um, you took how many years to write this book?

ISAACSON: Well it took about five or six years to write it but as, my wife whom you know, you know, studied in Florence when she was in college.

We used to go there.

And so when we'd take trips to France or Italy, instead of just looking at the art I loved to see the notebooks.

And you mentioned Bill Gates, Bill Gates had bought the Codex Leicester, the great scientific notebook of Leonardo.

And you can even see some of the great scientific drawings that Leonardo does.

All of that is part of, uh, his science notebooks.

And so I became, over the course of 20 years, just, you know, fascinated by this guy's notebooks.

RUBENSTEIN: So let's go through his life, uh, a bit.

Uh, he's born where?

ISAACSON: He's born in Vinci which is, hence the title.

RUBENSTEIN: Where he got his name.

ISAACSON: Because it's Leonardo of Vinci.

RUBENSTEIN: And he was illegitimate?

ISAACSON: Illegitimate which was very lucky for him 'cause he didn't have to be a notary like his father and grandfather.

RUBENSTEIN: Who raised him, his mother or his father?

ISAACSON: His father generally raised him although his mother also lived in the village and she got married later.

But his father brings him to Florence, which is very, the village of Vinci is pretty near Florence.

And so as a 12 year old or so he goes to Florence and becomes apprentice to somebody who's not just an artist, uh, Andrea Verrocchio.

You know, people think of him as an artist 'cause he's done a lot of paintings.

But he's an engineer, he does pageants and plays, he put the copper ball... RUBENSTEIN: Right.

ISAACSON: On top of the Duomo, uh, the Cathedral in Florence.

So Leonardo is doing engineering and science and art as a young teenager.

RUBENSTEIN: Now he was gay and that was something which in those days was not exactly a welcome by people in the society or I think that's fair to say.

ISAACSON: Well, you know, in Florence it's kind of interesting and this may be why Florence was a cradle of the Renaissance.

Was, Leonardo arrives as a misfit.

He's illegitimate, he's gay, he's left-handed, he's a vegetarian, he's distracted, and yet he's totally embraced.

They love him in town.

The Medici family, everything else.

And you have a lot of gay artists there.

RUBENSTEIN: Right.

ISAACSON: And so I think it's a tolerance for diversity that made Florence different from most other cities coming out of the Middle Ages and helped the Renaissance get born.

RUBENSTEIN: And he was as we would say today out of the closet.

He was not hiding that he was gay?

ISAACSON: Oh definitely.

If you look in my book you can see his drawings of his, um, boyfriend Salai.

RUBENSTEIN: So let's talk about how he became such a gifted artist.

Where was the genius in terms of his, uh, writing or his illustrating?

ISAACSON: I think it was mainly his observational skills and it was because he just pushed himself.

In his notebooks you can see him saying study which birds raise their wing faster than lower it when they're taking off and which do the opposite.

Things are things when you and I are walking across Central Park we don't sit there and observe, you know, how do...

Which way the wing goes faster.

And eddies of water, he said why do they swirl and is the math the same as curls of hair?

And you see in the Mona Lisa those curls of the river and the curls of the hair.

RUBENSTEIN: Well, he also was very interested in the human body and he helped dissect, uh, cadavers.

Was that something that was legal at that time and... ISAACSON: Yeah.

RUBENSTEIN: What did he do, uh, that for?

ISAACSON: Yes.

It was just becoming legal and the church was allowing it at least in Florence and in Milan and he starts to do it to help his art.

You know, when he's doing "St. Jerome in the Wilderness" he can't get the neck muscle right so he... but Leonardo besides being so observant was deeply relentlessly almost quirkily curious.

So he start doing dissections and soon he was dissecting the heart, dissecting the liver.

And it wasn't just for his art.

He was doing it to understand the beauty of nature in all of its aspects.

RUBENSTEIN: Now he left 7,000 pages of, uh, various manuscripts and so forth... And what is actually in those manuscripts?

Just his musings or ideas, pictures?

ISAACSON: It's wonderful 'cause paper was a little bit expensive so he'd cram on a sheet of paper.

You could see him do a sketch for the Last Supper but then also the swirls of water going by a rock and then he would do a mathematical puzzle he loved which was trying to square a circle which means make a square the same size as a circle using only a ruler and protractor.

RUBENSTEIN: Now the most famous painting in the world many people would say, the most expensive if it ever came for sale, would be the Mona Lisa.

ISAACSON: Absolutely.

RUBENSTEIN: Why is it so famous?

How long did he take to paint it?

Did he actually finish it?

And where was it when he died?

ISAACSON: It took him at least 16 years.

It was supposed to be a commission for a cloth merchant in Florence of wife Lisa but of course it was the ultimate work of Leonardo.

It was how do we fit into the cosmos the river coming down and connecting to the veins of the human but also the science of the lips even.

He had dissected every nerve and every muscle that touches the lips and even knew the details we see in the center of our eye but the shadows we see out of the corner.

So that makes us smile enigmatic.

It flickers on and off.

All of that goes into the Mona Lisa and year after year he carries it from Florence to Rome and eventually he ends up in France at Amboise which is a chateau of young Francis the First who's trying with his mother to bring the Renaissance to France and brings Leonardo there.

And at his death bed there he is still with the Mona Lisa.

RUBENSTEIN: So, geniuses we've talked about, Henry Kissinger, um, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, Leonardo.

What do they all have in common?

ISAACSON: They all love to see different disciplines, everything from art to engineering to science to beauty and music, whether it's Einstein playing Mozart on his violin when he's trying to understand the harmonies of the spheres when he's doing general relativity to Steve Jobs loving design and beauty and, uh, you know, the type of industrial design he had.

And I think people who love all subjects can sort of see the patterns of nature and it makes them more intuitive.

That's true of almost all of 'em.

RUBENSTEIN: You have another book in mind other than the autobiography you don't want to write?

ISAACSON: No.

I am doing a book now on biotechnology and the editing of the human genome with a group of people, including Jennifer Doudna at Berkeley but there's others, George Church at Harvard, Feng Zhang at MIT Harvard that have figured out the way called CRISPR to edit our genes.

And just recently in China a designer baby was born where somebody used it to edit the genes of an embryo.

RUBENSTEIN: Well I look forward to reading that book and Walter thank you very much for your time and the great works you've given us.

ISAACSON: Thank you David.

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