#273: Lessons from Steve Jobs, Leonardo da Vinci, and Ben Franklin

Walter Isaacson (@WalterIsaacson https://twitter.com/WalterIsaacson/) is a professor at Tulane University, and the president and CEO of The Aspen Institute https://www.aspeninstitute.org/our-people/walter-isaacson/, a nonpartisan educational and policy studies institute based in Washington, DC. He has been the chairman and CEO of CNN and the editor of TIME magazine. He is the author of many biographies I have recommended, including The Innovators https://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Hackers-Geniuses-Created-Revolution/dp/1476708703/ref=la_B000APFLB8_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1507900292&sr=1-5/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, Steve Jobs https://www.amazon.com/Steve-Jobs-Walter-Isaacson/dp/1501127624/ref=la_B000APFLB8_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1507900292&sr=1-2/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, Einstein: His Life and Universe https://www.amazon.com/Einstein-Life-Universe-Walter-Isaacson/dp/0743264746/ref=la_B000APFLB8_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1507900292&sr=1-4/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life https://www.amazon.com/Benjamin-Franklin-American-Walter-Isaacson/dp/074325807X/ref=la_B000APFLB8_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1507900292&sr=1-3/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, Kissinger: A Biography https://www.amazon.com/Kissinger-Biography-Walter-Isaacson/dp/0743286979/ref=la_B000APFLB8_1_8?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1507900292&sr=1-8/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, and his most recent, Leonardo da Vinci https://www.amazon.com/Leonardo-Vinci-Walter-Isaacson/dp/1501139150/ref=la_B000APFLB8_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1507900292&sr=1-1/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20. In this episode, you learn life lessons and tactics from Steve Jobs, Ben Franklin, Leonardo da Vinci, and more. Walter ties it all together beautifully. We had a lot of fun in this conversation, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did! This podcast is brought to you by 99Designs http://99designs.com/tim, the world's largest marketplace of graphic designers. I have used them for years to create some amazing designs. When your business needs a logo, website design, business card, or anything you can imagine, check out 99Designs. I used them to rapid prototype the cover http://99designs.com/tim for The Tao of Seneca, and I've also had them help with display advertising and illustrations. If you want a more personalized approach, I recommend their 1-on-1 service http://99designs.com/tim. You get original designs from designers around the world. The best part? You provide your feedback, and then you end up with a product that you're happy with or your money back. Click this link http://www.99designs.com/tim and get a free $99 upgrade. Give it a test run… This podcast is also brought to you by Shopify https://www.shopify.com/tim. With the help of Shopify, many readers of my blog — first-time business owners — have ended up making millions of dollars each with their side gigs. Back in 2009, I helped create Shopify's Build a Business https://www.shopify.com/tim, which is now the world's largest entrepreneurship competition. The goal of this competition is to entice would-be entrepreneurs to get off the couch and make things happen, and all you have to do to qualify is open a store on Shopify and start selling https://www.shopify.com/tim. Top sellers in each category then have the exclusive opportunity to learn from mentors and experts like Tony Robbins, Daymond John, Seth Godin, Sir Richard Branson, and me a location like Oheka (aka Gatsby's) Castle or Necker Island. Listeners to this show can go to shopify.com/tim https://www.shopify.com/tim to sign up for a free, 30-day trialand get access to video courses that will help you get started. Check it out at shopify.com/tim today https://www.shopify.com/tim!

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Tim Ferriss?

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• 0:06Speaker 01

  Can I ask you a personal question?

• 0:08Speaker 02

  No, we're seeing an appropriate time.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 0:24Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:04Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:24Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers from all different fields, to tease out the habits, routines, tactics of different types, favorite books, whatever it might be, that help them to excel in their chosen field. And my guest today, I'm so happy to have on the podcast, as far as I can tell, this is his first long-form podcast, Walter Isaacson. I've spent a little bit of time with Walter, and he is more impressive the more I get to know him. He can be found on Twitter. You can say hello, at Walter Isaacson. University Professor of History at Tulane. He has been the CEO of the Aspen Institute.

• 2:09Tim Ferriss?

  He has been Chairman of CNN, as well as Editor of Time Magazine. He is the author of many biographies that I've recommended to thousands of people. The Innovators, Steve Jobs, Einstein, His Life and Universe, Benjamin Franklin, An American Life, and Kissinger, A Biography. His latest book is the biography I have most been anticipating, and it does not disappoint. It is simply titled Leonardo da Vinci. And in this episode, you get expertise, life lessons, tactics, from not just one person, because Walter has lived a fascinating life, but also from Steve Jobs, from Franklin,

• 2:53Tim Ferriss?

  from Leonardo da Vinci. And Walter ties it all together beautifully. So we had a lot of fun in this conversation, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Without further ado, please welcome to the show Walter Isaacson.

• 3:11Tim Ferriss?

  Walter, welcome to the show.

• 3:14Speaker 03

  Thank you very much, Tim. It's great to be talking to you again.

• 3:17Tim Ferriss?

  It's, uh, it has been years now that I've wanted to get you on this show because you offer the rare opportunity to get something like a 15 for the price of one deal in terms of interviewing, because your life is, I think, worth exploring in many different ways. And then, of course, you've covered so many other lives and unearthed the details of so many other lives, including the most recent, of course, Leonardo da Vinci, which we will get to. And then you have Innovators, Steve Jobs, Einstein, and then before that, several books. But I wanted to talk about Ben Franklin for just one moment, because Ben is one of the

• 4:02Tim Ferriss?

  historical figures that I've been most obsessed with, and I've recommended your biography of him to thousands and thousands of people. And you wrote this of Franklin, who certainly is one of my personal heroes. Quote, "He was during his 84-year-long life America's best scientist, inventor, diplomat, writer, and business strategist, and he was also one of its most practical, though not most profound, political thinkers." Is it possible? In today's world, where people tend to think of specialization as the route to success, possible to live a life with that many boxes checked? Do you have to over-specialize like an insect?

• 4:46Speaker 03

  That is a really good question. And in your own books, you talk about life lessons that you should learn. And for me, Benjamin Franklin and Leonardo da Vinci have the same life lesson, which is be interested in everything. And that's the thing that Ben Franklin did. You know, he loved riding up and down the coast and doing the postal system and looking at whirlwinds and studying weather patterns. But he was also a great, you know, electricity experimenter, and of course, a great writer. And that notion of looking at nation, at nature's patterns is something I saw ultimately in Leonardo da Vinci, which is if you can be interested in everything, if you can be

• 5:30Speaker 03

  cross-disciplinary, then you can see the patterns of our cosmos and how we connect to them. And that's the magic of Ben Franklin, but even of Steve Jobs, who loved art and engineering. He loved the humanities and technology. And of course, the ultimate of that is Leonardo da Vinci, who was the greatest creative genius in history because he spanned disciplines. So yes, this is something we can push us, ourselves to do in our everyday lives, which is if you're really interested in technology and science and coding, make sure you understand the beauty of music and poetry and literature.

• 6:11Speaker 03

  And if you love literature, don't forget that you have to understand how a transistor works, how a circuit processes logical sequences, because you want to stand like Leonardo and Ben Franklin did, at that intersection of art and science.

• 6:26Tim Ferriss?

  So this intersection is something that I really want to underscore because it seems like, like you mentioned, part of what attracts you to people like Steve Jobs or Einstein is how the creativity seem to emerge in part from connecting the arts and the sciences. So Einstein say, playing Mozart to inspire him to understand relativity, or Jobs connecting beauty and calligraphy and so on into computers. In your own life, what are your, what would you view as your core strengths? And then what are the areas that you're trying to explore more on a personal level?

• 7:02Speaker 03

  One of the strengths that I've tried to have, and it began in the old days when I was, you know, a writer for Time, a news magazine, was to be interested in everything. At Time Magazine, we called it a being a floater, which meant you wrote for the music section one week and the medicine section the next week. And that, that really excited me. And from Leonardo and Ben Franklin, what I've learned is to push myself to be more curious and more observant. When I'm walking down the street and I see the blue sky, you know, I gotta pause and be curious. Why is it that dark of a blue? What, you know, what is it that makes the sky blue?

• 7:43Speaker 03

  That's something Ben Franklin looked at, Einstein looked at, and Leonardo in his notebooks has a lot of pages dedicated to why the sky is blue. So I think I have to be, and I think we all have to be, push ourselves to just notice the most ordinary things in life and marvel at them.

• 8:02Tim Ferriss?

  Are there any particular examples that you can pull from your own life? Because Da Vinci, and I, we're definitely going to spend a lot of time on our dear friend Leo, but the, the lists that he made of things to do and learn are just fantastic. I mean, observe the goose's foot, or the why is the sky blue question you mentioned. Describe the tongue of a woodpecker. Why is the fish in the water swifter than the bird in the air when it ought to be the contrary, since the water is heavier and thicker than air? Are there any questions that you are exploring or have explored recently that you can share?

• 8:44Speaker 03

  Yes, and you know, it comes from, as you said, Leonardo having these wonderful notebook pages where every morning, his life hack was make a list of what he wants to know. Like, why do people yawn? You know, or, you know, what does the tongue of a woodpecker look like? You gotta be pretty curious to wake up one morning and say, what's a woodpecker tongue look like? You know, why would you even, you know, how would you even find out? He had to get a woodpecker and probably open the mouth. So, the things I've tried to be more curious about now involve what you and I are doing, which is media and social media. And I think I'm curious about ways in which having media that connects us and unifies us, rather than divide us, can happen.

• 9:29Speaker 03

  For example, I'm looking at ways that maybe you can have social networks that, that have authentication. So you're absolutely sure who you're talking to, and there's not anonymity. Anonymity is great online in certain circumstances, but at times, we need to find common ground. Also, how to connect our social networking to what you and I do at the Aspen Institute, which is every now and then, have, you know, physical encounters with people. How do you lead a blended life that's both consuming media, producing media, but also face-to-face encounters?

• 10:07Tim Ferriss?

  You know, this, this mention of the physical encounters, I have so many questions for you. We'll see if we get through even half of them. But I've, I've read, having just gone through yet another book process myself, although I, I wouldn't even call my books books when I, when I look at yours.

• 10:29Speaker 03

  I love your books. I love your books.

• 10:31Tim Ferriss?

  Different category, different type. But it seems like you-

• 10:36Speaker 03

  Leonardo would have loved your Four Hour Chef book. He, he loved cooking and food.

• 10:41Tim Ferriss?

  He loved a lot of things. And you seem to enjoy seeing the actual places or artifacts that you're writing about, whether that's the Colossus at Bletchley Park, or the Charles Babbage's reconstructed engine at the London Science Museum. Is that for personal enjoyment, or do you get something else out of that? Because it seems very resource-intensive.

• 11:09Speaker 03

  Well, you know, we can see anything we want online these days. And then suddenly you have the thrill of seeing the original object. I'll give you a story. Uh, a few years ago, when I was, uh, working on Leonardo's notebooks, I was able to get access to the greatest drawing ever done by human hand in my mind, which is Vitruvian Man, that guy, the naked guy, you know, spread eagle in the circle and the square. And it's in the fourth floor of a, uh, the Academy in Venice. And they don't display it because sunlight or light could make it fade. But I convinced him to bring it out for me. And you climb the four flights of stairs and suddenly they bring out this absolutely wonderful drawing.

• 11:53Speaker 03

  And you see the incision lines where Leonardo very firmly with his pen, did the square and then the protractor point and he does the circle. And all of a sudden you get a little bit of chills in your spine because you feel like you're in the presence, five hundred years later, of the master. And so even though we can all see things virtually, Steve Jobs used to teach over and over again, create physical spaces where you actually run into people and see real objects. Because this notion that we can all live virtually, we can learn a lot virtually and we can do a lot, you know, with, uh, our new forms of media.

• 12:37Speaker 03

  But there's also something very humanizing about being somewhere in person. Seeing the computer that Alan Turing built at Bletchley Park. Seeing the Mona Lisa in person or Vitruvian Man in person. Being there in the little town of Vinci where Leonardo was born. This gives you the human connection. And one of the things we're in danger of these days is losing the human connection because the virtual and digital connections are so easy.

• 13:08Tim Ferriss?

  So the

• 13:11Tim Ferriss?

  I completely agree with you, and I think that that is a bear trap that I set for myself very often by choosing to write books, which end up, in some cases, putting me into deep extended periods of isolation. So my first question about specialization was a bit of a setup, in a sense, because just the first two lines of your bio, Walter Isaacson, University Professor of History at Tulane, has been CEO of Aspen Institute, Chairman of CNN, and editor of Time Magazine. So you have a very wide-ranging career. Why add book writing to that? Why do you write these books?

• 13:45Speaker 03

  I think I like writing biography, because it connects us with people. You do books that really distill the essence of wisdom. I mean, your past three or four books give you the certain essences. But for me, the narrative of a human life is particularly exciting. And, you know, just to give you the original story, I was at Time Magazine, and we would, you know, once a week, put out a magazine. It was before the internet made, you know, Time come out every day. And we always put a person on the cover. And it was because, just like the Bible teaches us lessons through Adam and Eve, or Jesus,

• 14:25Speaker 03

  or the people in the Bible, that was the best way, it seemed, to describe the values of our time, is through people. But I got very frustrated. A friend of mine and I, we were working at the magazine together, we got frustrated that you had to keep it in five, six, or seven pages. And so we set out to write a book. We did it together. It was called The Wise Men. And out of that, I started doing biographies, because I do think the best way to tell the history of our time is through the people who make it.

• 14:58Tim Ferriss?

  And could you describe for us your writing process? Now, I'm going to get more granular, because I know that's very wide sweeping. But, and I'm actually sort of leaving a gingerbread trail here for hopefully some affirmation of something I do. But I've read that you write from 9:00 PM until 2:00 AM, and then you try to sleep, say, seven or eight hours. Is that the case still, even with this latest book? Do you tend to write at night?

• 15:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm a night person. I remember writing about Ben Franklin, our hero. He said, "Early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise." That was in Poor Richard's Almanack. And then I looked at Ben Franklin, he never went to bed that early. He never got up that early. So I think, okay, to each his own, you know, we each have our own methods. I, one thing that saves me a lot of time is I don't watch TV in the evening. You know, you can, TV, I love being online, I love podcasts, I love interactive things. I even love social media. But I find that if you just space out in front of the television, you end up wasting a lot of hours.

• 16:13Speaker 03

  So around 9:00 PM, and I'm, happily, I'm married to somebody who goes to bed early, Kathy does. I like to start writing, and I sort of get a new burst of energy. And that's just been my habit.

• 16:28Tim Ferriss?

  Do you have any particular setup rituals or location for your writing? Do you have an office that you go into at home? Is that where you do most of it?

• 16:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, I do a lot of it in my office and home. But one of the absolute wonderful things about the digital age is you can do it anywhere. I mean, I used to have to have all the books I was using arrayed around me. But now my notes are electronic. I can even do it on my iPhone, you know, you know, in an airport. If I, my plane is delayed, I can start writing there. So I don't have any set ritual, except I have one rule about writing, which is a rule that my editor taught me 30 years ago, which is all things in good time. Keep it chronological. And so whether it's a biography or anything else I'm writing,

• 17:20Speaker 03

  I try to make it a storytelling narrative that, that is chronological. So things build up, people learn things as the narrative goes on. And that helps me organize things because when I grew up in Louisiana, I had a mentor named Walker Percy, the great novelist. And he said, "There are two types of people who come out of Louisiana. Preachers. And storytellers. And he said, for God's sake, be a storyteller. The world's got too many preachers. And so my method is to pretend I'm telling somebody a story, whether it's about Leonardo, Ben Franklin, anybody else, and make it a narrative story, just like you'd tell around a dinner table.

• 18:04Tim Ferriss?

  Evan, the, how did you develop your storytelling ability? Because I recall so many bits and pieces of your books, including, for instance, Franklin. And I may be getting the details wrong, such as memory, right? We're recreating it as we recall it, but who would, I want to say, put printing equipment or barrels of ink in a wheelbarrow and roll it up and down the street to show that he was working so hard, even though it was just a demonstration?

• 18:35Speaker 03

  He wanted to show, he said, he often understood that appearances were important. And he said he could never really be humble, even though he knew he should be. So he developed the pretense of humility. He pretended to be humble. And likewise, he wasn't as hard working as he wanted to be. But he'd take his wheelbarrow early, you know, in the day, like, you know, after he opened his print shop, and wheel, use the wheelbarrow to bring his ink and paper to his shop. So everybody would see how hardworking he was. But you know, that's storytelling. That's an anecdote that gives you an insight into a character. And you do it through a narrative little story, you know, just like every great piece

• 19:19Speaker 03

  of writing, from the Bible to the Odyssey to Huckleberry Finn does.

• 19:24Tim Ferriss?

  And when you, when you put down, say, a first draft of, let's just take that particular Franklin story, how do you edit? When you go back to look at your first attempt at putting that on paper? What questions are you asking yourself?

• 19:40Speaker 03

  Well, the first thing I do, you know, I obviously write it on a computer, but I realize that something reads differently on paper than it does on the screen. And so I have a little quirk, which I developed back in the old days when you're always afraid your computer would eat what you'd written that night, is I print it out in the evening. I'm sorry about the trees that may have been lost, but I'll print it out, whatever I've written that evening, and then the next morning, read it aloud to myself. Because that way, you make sure it's easy and fun to read, whereas if you're just looking at it on the screen, sometimes you don't edit it properly.

• 20:23Tim Ferriss?

  See, I want to, I want to bring you back to Louisiana. So this podcast format is anything but chronological, so I apologize.

• 20:34Speaker 03

  Good thing about storytellers and being around a campfire, you can hop around a bit. You can change the subject.

• 20:40Tim Ferriss?

  This is the memento version of, as I suppose, exploring your life. You mentioned preachers and storytellers, so I wanted to flashback to Louisiana and tie in another storyteller. So, and this, this will be a way to get back into your childhood a little bit. You wrote a piece on Michael Lewis after his latest book, and my understanding is you both went to the same high school.

• 21:09Speaker 03

  We both went to Newman. In fact, he and I, he's interviewing me in Los Angeles in about three weeks at LA Talks, one of those great things, because he's just a wonderful guy, and trust me, he is a good storyteller.

• 21:22Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, he's a spectacular storyteller. And I wanted to just read one paragraph from this piece because I thought it was so hilarious, and it'll give me a way to get into high school. So, and feel free to fact correct me on any of this, but let me confess that my natural inclination when asked to write an essay on Michael Lewis was to dredge up some of the tales of his misbehavior as a kid and reveal what a miscreant he actually is. Lewis and I went to the same school when we were growing up in New Orleans. I'm a few years older and when I became a journalist and book writer in New York, this is the word smithing that I thought was so hilarious, I was occasionally brought back to Newman and trotted around like a pony in a paddock in one of those misguided efforts that schools undertake to inspire younger students.

• 22:05Tim Ferriss?

  Michael was not inspired. Instead, as he later often told me, he was annoyed. So, two questions. Why was he annoyed? And then two, when you were in high school, what inspired you or what would have inspired you?

• 22:21Speaker 03

  Well, you know, I think you can imagine being in high school and all of a sudden they bring back somebody who's a few years older and say, here's what you ought to do, here's what you ought to be. And of course, no doubt, when I was, you know, 22 or 23, coming back from being a Time Magazine writer, I was probably a bit full of myself. I hadn't learned the Ben Franklin tricks of humility. And Michael too, I love him dearly. You know, he's just a spunky character. So, he used to joke about, you know, they bring all these people back and tell us how good we should be. You know, we all were interested in misbehaving

• 23:01Speaker 03

  in high school. But, you know, high school's a wonderful time. You know, it forms you for good and for bad.

• 23:08Tim Ferriss?

  Were there any mentors, looking back, you mentioned one already, although I'm not sure exactly on the timing of everything in due time. Were there any particular mentors who really shaped you or changed your trajectory in high school or college years?

• 23:27Speaker 03

  Yes, I I had a couple of great teachers, one of whom Dave Prescott is actually still teaching at Newman. He's been teaching fifty-one years there, which I find somewhat astonishing. But particularly I had people at the newspaper, you know, we used to hang around and I knew journalists who were slightly older. And when you get into storytelling, you realize, you know, that's what newspaper journalism in New Orleans was like. And so we'd I'd hang around and I'd try to get summer jobs working on the Times picky in. That's where I kind of learned first how to story tell and secondly, just how to be curious, just have to go someplace and ask a lot of questions.

• 24:09Tim Ferriss?

  So curiosity is actually, I think, going to be a common thread throughout this entire conversation. You've said, I suppose, written, maybe also said of Leonardo, that one of his distinct traits was a, quote, "passionate, playful, and occasionally obsessive curiosity." Now, a lot of people out there would consider themselves curious, but what was playful about Leonardo da Vinci?

• 24:39Speaker 03

  You know, we joke about, describe the tongue of the woodpecker, being on a long list of things he wanted to do in a particular day. But that takes a little bit of imagination and sort of spunkiness, just say, okay, that woodpecker's pecking against that wood so hard, how does he keep his brain intact? And so it was sort of quirky and playful. Also, I mean, he did theater. That was his main job when he was a young, you know, young, is that he produced pageants and theater for the Medici family in Florence and then the Duke of Milan. And so everything in the theater is playful.

• 25:20Speaker 03

  You know that aerial screw that looks a bit like a helicopter and people say Leonardo invented the helicopter? Actually, that was for a play. It was to bring the angels down from the top of the theater onto the stage. And so that fantasy, the dragons that he conjured up, you know, for the stage, or the ingenious devices and props, these were things that were meant to amuse people. And so the great thing about Leonardo is every one of his paintings is very narrative and dramatic. You know, look at The Last Supper. If you look at it, you realize, hey, this looks like a stage set. Every, you know, the table's tilted, so we get to see the top of it.

• 26:04Speaker 03

  There's sort of an accelerated, artificial perspective. So it looks deeper than it really is. And everybody's sitting on the same side of the table. And their gestures are somewhat theatrical. But most important, it's a narrative. As I said, it, it actually flows in time. You can feel Jesus saying, one of you shall betray me. And then you look at the picture and that's reverberating out through the table. Each person making a gesture as if the sound is just hitting them. So when you see the theatricalness of what he did, the narrativeness of what he did, and how the theater and pageants and performances tied into his art and to his science.

• 26:48Speaker 03

  Then you say, okay, what a wide ranging curiosity. And even a quirky and playful curiosity he had.

• 26:56Tim Ferriss?

  What, what are some other? You mentioned Leonardo inventing the helicopter, right? As a, is a common misunderstanding or maybe exaggeration of, of Da Vinci. What are some other common misconceptions? Or old wives tales, if that's even the right label for, uh, related to Leonardo's inventions, life, art, or anything else? Are there any that really stick out to you?

• 27:26Speaker 03

  Well, he never really was able to conquer doing a flying machine. He tried very hard. He also tried to make a perpetual motion machines. You know, where the water would flow down and turn a screw. And the screw would bring the water back up because he wanted to see if he could do perpetual motion. And he even tried some mathematical things that he tried to do, such as the ancient problem called squaring the circle, which means making a circle the exact same area as a square, but using only a protractor and a ruler to do so. The thing about all of these things he tried to do is they're impossible. You know, you can't square the circle, as we've discovered.

• 28:11Speaker 03

  You know, pi isn't a rational number. It can't be done. Likewise, humans can't propel themselves just by flapping mechanical devices, and perpetual motion can't happen. But this too is a lesson from Leonardo, which is every now and then, you should try to do the impossible. Then you discover why it's impossible, but also you stretch your imagination.

• 28:36Tim Ferriss?

  And you've, you've, you've said of Leonardo that, and I think you make a very important point, that if, if you don't occasionally attempt what you may think is on the edges of possibility, you, you, you can't really delineate the line between the very edge, outer edge of the possible versus the impossible.

• 28:57Speaker 03

  Absolutely. That's actually in some of the things, you know, the mentor advice in your books. You gotta, you gotta blur the edge between the possible and the impossible. Steve Jobs called that, or the people who worked with Steve called it, his reality distortion field. He would push people to do the impossible. Likewise, it's often useful to blur the line between observation and imagination. In other words, to be able to see things exactly, but also, to use Leonardo da Vinci's line, be able to see things that nature has not yet created, to, to sort of imagine and create in your own mind the fanciful things. And so, whether it's the angels coming down

• 29:42Speaker 03

  in the Angel of the, the Annunciation painting, or so much of his art and much of his theater and science, he blurred that line between fantasy and reality, and between the possible and the impossible. So he would know where the line was, but he realized that in the real world, there are not a lot of sharp lines. Most lines are blurry.

• 30:04Tim Ferriss?

  And I would imagine a lot of that exploration takes place in his seventy-two-hundred-plus pages of notes and scribbles that you'd said are the greatest record of curiosity ever created. Were there any particular standout items that captured your fascination or imagination when you were reviewing some of these notes?

• 30:32Speaker 03

  There's one particular spread page in the notebooks, I mean, there are hundreds of them, but there's one of them that I actually explore in the book and give a whole section to, because it's a page, unfortunately for us, paper was a little expensive back then, so he would cram every sheet with things, and you look at him, as we said at the very beginning, crossing disciplines, having his mind jump across different topics and ideas, as if it's a very curious mind dancing playfully with nature. And so in the middle of the drawing is one of his craggy old warriors with curly hair

• 31:11Speaker 03

  and the jutting jaw that he loved to draw, but coming out of his back is a sort of mountain, because he wants to show him against mountains, but then the triangle of the mountain becomes a piece of geometry, and once again, he's trying to do the squaring of the circle, and he figures out if he does a right triangle and puts a circle in it, maybe that'll help him square the circle. And then there's little whirls that come out like spirals from the geometry that turn into swirls of air, then swirls of a flower, because he loved these spiral patterns. And then there's, you know, a bunch of writing, and it ends with a recipe for boiling certain

• 31:55Speaker 03

  types of nuts with oil and making blonde hair dye. And I realize, oh, he's in his mid-thirties when he's doing this page, and he's really good-looking, that Vitruvian man, that naked guy in the circle and the square, that's a self-portrait of Leonardo. So Leonardo, you know, liked to be in shape. He did, you know, his four-hour workout every day. I mean, his, you know, his, I'm sorry, I'm messing up your book, but his workout scheme every day, and yet, there's that tiny bit of vanity. He's starting to dye his hair.

• 32:31Tim Ferriss?

  Does he describe his exercise routine at any point? Or do we just know that he was active?

• 32:38Speaker 03

  Well, we know that he did some muscle routines. He liked to take horseshoes and try to bend them and unbend them. He loved horseback riding and said that the particular way it was good exercise is making sure you look good on the horse. Once again, it's the connection of beauty, you know, to something like exercise. And, you know, we just know that he led a very active life, loved being outdoors and was a man of great strength and, you know, good physical. You know, he had long blond curly hair and a great physique.

• 33:17Tim Ferriss?

  Now, there are a few things that, just having been fascinated myself by Leonardo for so long, that I was aware of. For instance, his left-handedness. But I was not aware until I read some of your work related to him that he was such a historical misfit in a lot of respects. I mean, he was illegitimate, gay, vegetarian, left-handed, like we already just covered, easily distracted, and certainly in some of his views, heretical. And I want to look at two very short excerpts because I want to explore them.

• 34:02Tim Ferriss?

  The first is Leonardo da Vinci had the good luck to be born out of wedlock. Otherwise, he would have been expected to become a notary like the first legitimate sons in his family, stretching back at least five generations. And then the second piece to this is Leonardo's only formal learning was at an abacus school, an elementary academy that emphasized the math skills useful in commerce. Leonardo da Vinci liked to boast that because he was not formally educated, he had to learn from his own experiences instead. Did he view being born out of wedlock to be any type of blessing in disguise? Or is that just retrospectively you looking at the what-if of the time that that was a blessing for him?

• 34:45Speaker 03

  Well, it was a complex situation for him. He's born out of wedlock. His father, who's this great notary, famous guy at the time, doesn't have another child until Leonardo's in his late teens. So Leonardo is both belonging to a family, but not fully belonging. Certainly Leonardo felt he was extraordinarily lucky, as he put it, not to be sent to one of the Latin schools and universities that he would have been sent to had he been the son of a legitimate son of a notary. And he said because it made him a disciple of experience. He questioned received wisdom. And this is really the beginning of the scientific revolution.

• 35:27Speaker 03

  And, uh, you know, an early forerunner of it. Because instead of taking the received wis- wisdom of the scholastics and the medieval scholars, or even the ancients, Leonardo always said, let me test that. Let me devise an experiment. Let me look to my own experience to see if that's right. And so, early on in his life, he would, sort of had a chip on his shoulder about the fact that he didn't have a formal education. But by the time he's in his thirties, he's pretty much bragging about it because he says that it allowed him to question every piece of received wisdom. He also would have made a pretty terrible notary. He was not very good at doing

• 36:11Speaker 03

  things, you know, rote, mechanical, uh, repetitive type things.

• 36:18Tim Ferriss?

  Was his, uh, inclination to experimentation, uh, and testing something that was really just born of his programming, for lack of a better, uh, way to describe it? Did it seem innate, or did he develop that somehow, well, through other people?

• 36:36Speaker 03

  Well, I think he developed it. And this is sort of the key to the book I've written. Which is, it's not like he was born with some innate. Uh, superpowers like Newton was or Einstein was that you and I can never do. He kind of pushed himself to be curious and he did it through his own will through making these lists. And partly he does it as a young boy because he's not going to school. Like some of the other kids of, you know, his father's friends. And so he's got to learn things himself. He was also extraordinarily lucky to be born the same year.

• 37:17Speaker 03

  That Gutenberg first started selling books from his printing shop. Because the year before Leonardo was born, there were no printed books you could buy. By the time Leonardo's in his thirties, there's about three million volumes of books. And he collects books like crazy. So that self taught, that push to be curious. I think comes from not having been sent to have a formal education and really wanting to make up for it.

• 37:50Tim Ferriss?

  Do you have, uh, because I know this is a question that I get quite often. As someone who went to college, uh, I think that there are many people right now questioning the value of higher education. Uh, even though I felt like my val- my experience was very valuable and helped me in many things afterwards. Uh, how do you think about the uses or misuses of higher education in that case? Is it, uh, are there any parameters you would use to determine whether someone is better suited like a Leonardo? By subjecting, uh, their life to experiment and experience versus formal schooling or, uh?

• 38:32Speaker 03

  Well, I'm a believer in education and higher education. A lot of people, after I talk about Einstein, who always thought out of the box or Leonardo. Who always, you know, questioned things and thought out of the box. The people will come up to me and say, I'm just like, you know, Einstein. I go, yeah, sure you are. Tell me why. He says, oh, because I think out of the box. And I say, well, you know, he knew what was in the box before he thought out of it. So I think it's useful to try to imbibe as much learning as possible. But the problem with our education system, not just universities, but starting in kindergarten, is they can take a person who is really playfully,

• 39:12Speaker 03

  wonderfully, and joyfully curious and smash the curiosity out of them by jamming them with received wisdom. This is why Einstein runs away from school. This is why Steve Jobs drops out of college. And it's what separated Leonardo from the more educated people of his time. So I guess the answer to your question is, it's wonderful to be able to partake of a great education. But remember that education is supposed to juice up your curiosity, not sate or diminish your curiosity.

• 39:48Tim Ferriss?

  Are there, are there any particular, you mentioned the people coming up to you saying, I'm just like Einstein. Uh huh. And I'm not.

• 39:56Speaker 03

  Well, some of them come up and say, I'm just like Steve Jobs, you know, I'm a really tough boss. When something really sucks or whatever, I just yell at people and tell them that. And I go, yeah, did, have you ever invented the iPod? Have you ever invented the iPhone? And they kind of shrug. And I say, if you haven't, you don't have the right to try to be like, you know, to be tough on people the way he was. Because he was tough on people and he got them to do things they didn't know they could do. And they appreciated it for the rest of their lives.

• 40:27Tim Ferriss?

  Right, yeah. So minor slash gigantic difference between the two, certainly. The, the, the question that I'm so curious about is, among others, which of the biographical subjects you've written books about, do you most identify with and why?

• 40:47Speaker 03

  I probably think Ben Franklin because, you know, I'm, I know that I have a great curiosity about a whole lot of things. I'm not somebody like, you know, Jefferson or Madison, who's a great profound philosopher, or somebody like Sam Adams, who, or his cousin John, who had extraordinary sort of partisan passions. I'm a little bit like Benjamin Franklin, which is, I know that other people know more than I do and are often more passionate than I do, and I like hearing about them, and I like bringing them together. I like writing about them. Ben Franklin started as a journalist and as a magazine publisher, you know, which

• 41:31Speaker 03

  I can relate to. He was very interested in media. He created the postal system so he could have a distribution system for all the types of media he was creating. But then he pushes himself, as I did, because my father's an engineer, to love science. And so Ben Franklin does those electricity experiments and does the charting of the Gulf Stream and all of his scientific experiments and inventions because he realized that you gotta connect innovation, invention, science, curiosity with the humanities. And so he's been my inspiration, just like he's been your inspiration.

• 42:13Tim Ferriss?

  For someone listening, and this is, I suppose, as much for myself as anyone else, because I'm always hoping to deepen the ability, my ability to connect these seemingly separate dots or spheres. If someone listening to this, let's just say they've been specialized for a long period of time and they want to expand their general knowledge, is there a particular approach that you would take, say if they're an engineer or they're an artist, and they, they want to foster that ability? Are there any particular approaches that you might take?

• 42:52Speaker 03

  Well, just be curious about everything. And usually, it's the people who love the humanities. You know, tend to be people I know, who think that we put too much emphasis on engineering these days, and engineering, you know, school, in schools. And I disagree. And what I particularly disagree with is the fact that they'll make fun of somebody who doesn't, say, know the difference between Hamlet and Macbeth, or Picasso and, you know, Leonardo or something, who don't, people don't like art or music or literature. And yet, if I say to them,

• 43:32Speaker 03

  "Do you know the difference between a capacitor and a transistor? Do you know how on-off switches form a circuit and create logic? Do you, I know you think Greek and Latin are important, but have you ever had a feel for C++? Or Pascal, or great programming language?" And of course, most people like that haven't pushed themselves to realize, you take Ada Lovelace, who was a great, you know, Lord Byron's daughter. But she pushes herself to understand that a mathematical equation is just a nature's brushstroke for painting something in reality, just like a line of poetry is. And people will say, "Well, you know, I find math difficult."

• 44:18Speaker 03

  Well, take one of Ada Lovelace's father's lines of poetry. Lord Byron writes something like, "She walks in beauty like the night." That's a beautiful line. And if you wrestle with it, you kind of can figure out what it means. But it's not easy. You have to work at it. And likewise, people who love Lord Byron's poetry should also realize that maybe they can visualize science and math and engineering a little bit better, so that they can stand at that intersection and not cede, just to the engineers, the notion of creating great innovation. That was the secret of Steve Jobs. He loved calligraphy. He loved dance. He loved music.

• 45:04Speaker 03

  You know, he studied all those things before he drops out of college. And he also, of course, knows coding and engineering and circuitry. And he said by standing at that intersection, you can master real creativity. And so to me, it's not that hard. It's why I wrote the Leonardo da Vinci book. I mean, here's a guy who's working in an art studio in his, you know, late teens and early twenties as a student. But when he tries to get a job, he writes an 11 paragraph letter in which he talks about all of his engineering skills. He says, you know, I know how to divert water. I know how to build machines.

• 45:47Speaker 03

  I know how to design interesting buildings. And so by pushing himself to be both an engineer and an artist, that's why he becomes history's most creative genius. And you know what? It's something any of us can do. If we're really interested in music, we can also say, let me be interested in the beauty of, say, relativity theory and how cool that is and showing how the universe and space and time are like a curving fabric. All these things are beautiful.

• 46:26Tim Ferriss?

  So another, it seems to me that another piece of the puzzle, which I had underappreciated that you have elucidated in, certainly your writing on Da Vinci, but elsewhere as well, is the collaborative piece. And I'll just quote here briefly. Quote, "We tend to think of artists as lone creators holding a garret, waiting for inspiration to strike. But as evident in his notebooks and in the process that led to his drawings of Vitruvian Man, much of Leonardo's thinking was collegial." And I'll just jump forward, dot, dot, dot. "Leonardo knew the joys and advantages of having a team." Could you perhaps describe the similarities?

• 47:10Tim Ferriss?

  End or differences between how, say, Leonardo Franklin and Jobs collaborated. I know that's a big question, but if you have any observations.

• 47:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, but you know, we biographers have a dirty secret, is we make it seem like it's some guy or gal going into a garage and having a lightbulb moment, and that's creativity. And that's not the way it happened. When Steve Jobs, near the end of his life, I was talking to him, and I said, "What's the greatest product you ever created?" And I thought it'd be the original Macintosh, or maybe the iPhone. And he said, "No, creating a product's hard, but what's particularly hard is creating a team that will always create creative products." And so, building the team at Apple was the best thing he ever did, he said. And, you know, he was very push, you know, driven and quirky in his taste, but he knew

• 48:02Speaker 03

  how to have people around him who could execute and push back. Likewise with Benjamin Franklin. You know, there are all these passionate and smart people who are among the founders, but it's Ben Franklin who gathers them together in his backyard in Philadelphia, under a mulberry tree, and lets the passions cool down as he creates this team of people who are going to write both the Declaration and later on, the Constitution. Now, what surprised me is that Leonardo was that way. You know, that he was not some lone genius. He starts off in a studio with a whole lot of other people in Baraccio's studio, and they're jointly doing paintings together.

• 48:44Speaker 03

  You know, Leonardo's doing the angel and the scenery, and others, and the rippling of the water, and others are doing the faces, and, you know, they work together. And just take Vitruvian Man, the guy in the circle and the square. Everybody thinks that was a lone drawing. No, he had three friends. There were, you know, well, three or four of them together, and they were trying to design churches. And they had read the ancient scholar Vitruvius, who said, "The proportions of a church should mirror the proportions of a human." Leonardo does about 230 anatomical measurements to get the proportions of a human right. It's a beautiful piece of science, that drawing. But also, he wants to make it beautiful.

• 49:28Speaker 03

  The figure, that self-portrait of himself, is a figure of unnecessary beauty.

• 49:34Speaker 03

  But he's doing it, riding around with these people as they visit Pavia near Milan to look at the church that they're gonna make into a cathedral there. And they're all doing these drawings. They're having dinner. Leonardo and his young, you know, uh, uh, assistant are there and he's, the assistant spills wine at the dinner. We, we can just feel them collaborating and they all make drawings like that. Just Leonardo's is a thousand times better than his collaborators.

• 50:05Tim Ferriss?

  And this, this is, this is gonna be a complete lateral move. But I, I'm, I really wanna ask you, just because I, I, I want to satisfy my own curiosity. You'd mentioned earlier math as nature's brushstrokes, potentially. And then the, the combination of math and science and beauty and the Trivian Man. I know that, or it would seem, Elon Musk is a big fan of your books. And Elon is, is of the mind that we may be living in a simulation.

• 50:44Tim Ferriss?

  And by extension, I would think that the nature's brushstrokes as math are sort of, could be the underlying code of what we're experiencing. Do you have any thoughts whatsoever on the possibility that we are living in a simulated reality? I know that's-

• 51:02Speaker 03

  Well, you know, that starts way before Elon Musk.

• 51:05Tim Ferriss?

  Sure.

• 51:06Speaker 03

  Sort of the great theory that Rene Descartes wrestles with is the mind-body problem, but also the notion we could be a disembodied mind in a simulated universe. And how would we know? I think that, you know, first of all, you're never exactly going to know that. But as Einstein helps us do and Leonardo with his-

• 51:32Speaker 03

  Drive to be experimental and to discover things is that finding out what those underlying laws are, what those beautiful patterns of nature are, that helps connect us to our cosmos and make us feel like we're actually at home in this universe. That is not some simulation or whatever. If you look at the Trivian man, since we've been talking about that, the guy in the circle and the square, what it really is is besides the proportions of the church, it's a man standing in the earth and in the universe. And how does that man fit in?

• 52:13Speaker 03

  And I think we're all struggle throughout our lives. It's what makes us human to figure out, how do we fit in? What's our purpose here? And that was Leonardo's ultimate drive. He wanted to know everything that could be known about everything there was to know about the universe, especially how we fit into it. And by discovering the patterns of the universe and our connection to those patterns, I think he made himself feel more at home in the universe. So I can't answer your question, but I can sort of urge people to be more like Leonardo so that they feel more at home in the universe, which might make you a little bit less worried the way Elon Musk is.

• 52:57Tim Ferriss?

  In all of your research of, and certainly writing and digesting of Leonardo's life, did you perceive him to be a content or fulfilled person? I mean, how would you characterize his temperament?

• 53:14Speaker 03

  Well, he was tormented at times. He drew deluge drawings that showed an inner torment. There were times he got depressed. There were times he writes in his notebook, tell me, tell me if anything was ever accomplished, if anything ever got done. And I think that makes him very human. He tended to be distracted at times, but...

• 53:36Speaker 03

  I do think he knew that he was lucky. Something Michael Lewis and I have talked about, which is the happiest and most content people. Or people who wake up every morning and say, whoa, I am really lucky. And at a certain point in life, Leonardo realizes he's lucky that he was born out of wedlock. He's lucky he didn't go to a university and get allowed to receive wisdom. And he describes his good fortune in being so curious about so many things. So I think that, yes, there were times when he was tormented. And frankly, he probably had a disposition that if he lived today, we would have put him on,

• 54:18Speaker 03

  his doctor would have put him on a pharmaceutical regime to even out his mood swings. But we're lucky that he was left to deal in his own way, both with his angels and his devils, you know, both with the dragons and the demons that existed inside of his fevered imagination.

• 54:37Tim Ferriss?

  So the, the comment you just made on people recognizing their luck or how they're fortunate reminds me of a quote one of my friends actually had put on a bracelet, which is the struggle ends when the gratitude begins, which is a quote by Neil Donald Walsh.

• 54:56Speaker 03

  Wow, what a cool quote. And you know what? That's true of Ben Franklin and Leonardo is that coming to the moment of gratitude is actually the coming to the moment of grace.

• 55:12Tim Ferriss?

  How did Benjamin Franklin enact that? Did he have any particular routines or behaviors?

• 55:17Speaker 03

  He had a life hack that's a really interesting routine or behavior, which is he kept a ledger, because among the many things he was, was kind of a bookkeeper and shopkeeper. But he kept a ledger of what he called his errata, which were mistakes he made, moral flaws. And then he would put that on the left-hand side of the ledger. And on the right-hand side of the ledger, he would write what he did to make up for it and make good for it. For example, the first item really is that he was apprenticed to his brother, which meant he was, you know, indentured to work a certain number of years. But he runs away and breaks the apprenticeship without telling his brother. He disappears at night. And he called that, you know, a moral failing.

• 56:02Speaker 03

  And he puts it on the left side of the ledger. On the right side of the ledger, later on, he puts, after his brother died, he paid for the education and took over the raising of his brother's children. And so throughout his life, he saw where he made mistakes and tried to fix them. The most important of those was he tolerated the advertising of slavery in the newspaper he owned, the Pennsylvania Gazette. And at one point, even had a couple of household slaves that he let free after a while. But he agrees to the compromise at the Constitutional Convention that enshrines slavery into the Constitution.

• 56:42Speaker 03

  And he thinks this is the greatest moral, you know, mistake he made. And so when he's about age eighty, which back then was pretty old, he, um, rectifies that errata by starting and becoming president of the Society for the Abolition of Slavery. Leonardo did that too in his notebooks. He put down, you know, exactly what he wanted to learn and created treatises, which he never published. But it was everything from the flight of birds to anatomy, to art, to how light works, to how shadows are formed. He put them all down in his notebook and ticked off that he had mastered a certain concept.

• 57:28Tim Ferriss?

  In your, I'd love to tie some of your observations about Ben Franklin. I suppose by extension, Leonardo, but specifically Franklin. A question that you ask in your biography of him, which is led to by a statement, "But whatever view one takes, it is useful to engage anew with Franklin, for in doing so, we are grappling with a fundamental issue. How does one live a life that is useful, virtuous, worthy, moral, and spiritually meaningful? For that matter, which of these attributes is most important?" So. I'd love to ask you, in your life, right now, I mean, are there, which attribute

• 58:12Tim Ferriss?

  or priority do you find most important or most useful, in the sense that it's the lead domino that tends to maybe lead to the others? I know it's a wide question, yeah.

• 58:24Speaker 03

  Well, I'll make this, I'll make this personal, both with you and with me. Because one of the things the Aspen Institute does, and you as a Henry Crown fellow of the Institute went through this process, is how do you move from success to significance? What are the basic values that give a certain purpose to life? And like Benjamin Franklin, you know, I started off with certain values, like how I was going to be successful enough, how I was going to produce a few things that people might find useful. And then I tried to deepen a little bit more to say, and I think it helped going through Hurricane Katrina in my hometown of New Orleans, and then moving back part-time to

• 59:09Speaker 03

  New Orleans to be part of the Louisiana Recovery Authority. And you realize, over and over again, how much it's not about yourself, it's about figuring out how you're part of something larger than yourself. And that's a personal thing, when you start being engaged in civic life. But then it gets to the ultimate questions, which I don't feel I've come close to answering, but you asked him about Leonardo and others, which is, okay, and how do you fit in to the universe itself? What is our purpose here?

• 59:49Speaker 03

  What is it that connects us and makes us more than just a collection of atoms in perhaps an Elon Musk simulation? And that's not something you ever just get the answer to. But like Leonardo, every day, by looking at the patterns of nature, by understanding the beauties of the infinite works of nature and of creation, you have to keep marching along that path, even though you know you'll never get to the destination.

• 1:00:25Tim Ferriss?

  How do you, how do you personally grapple with or find peace related to these bigger cosmological questions or where you fit in? Is there anything that you've found to be particularly helpful in that, in that arena of your life?

• 1:00:48Speaker 03

  I think, you know, I start by reading and then writing biographies of other people who went down a path, a path of both understanding the infinite works of creation and then a little bit of how we fit into it and maybe getting closer to a spiritual understanding of our role in it. And we all try to explore. I began that, you know, when I was young and I mentioned Walker Percy, the novelist. And I was like, you know, 12 years old. We used to water ski on the bayou near his place. He had a daughter my age. And he talked about the search and I kept thinking, what's the search?

• 1:01:32Speaker 03

  And then I read The Moviegoer, his novel, and it's like, Binks Bowling, the main character. He's on the search, which is precisely the one you just talked about, which is, okay, I know a little bit about what I now do in life. I've learned some facts about the world, but I've now got to embark on the search about the more spiritual way that we fit into this. Now, if you read The Moviegoer and you read Walker Percy, you know, the search doesn't come out with one specific answer. For Walker Percy, it was a leap of faith. He became a devout Catholic.

• 1:02:17Speaker 03

  For me, it's not just a leap of faith that one needs, but you

• 1:02:24Speaker 03

  You march further down the path, the more you look at a Leonardo being astonished by the beautiful patterns of nature and then replicating them in his art and his engineering. And you look at people who've made things of deep human beauty and connected the humanities to technology. And you say, these people are at least on a path to help guide us to figure out how humans fit into the larger creation.

• 1:02:58Tim Ferriss?

  You know, I would love to, if you're open to it, ask you about some of your tougher periods because many people who listen to this podcast or read books or even just read, say, your biography on your book page, for instance, it looks, it looks like every time, perhaps, you step up to the plate, you're hitting home runs. And certainly, every person who's been successful in any given field that I've met has had tougher times. Are there any particular tougher times you've experienced? And did anything help you to get through them or get out of them?

• 1:03:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I certainly have not hit home runs my whole life. And on a very, you know, practical level, I was not very good when I got moved to run CNN. I was working at Time Magazine, same company owns CNN. And after editing the magazine, which I kind of love because you can be curious about everything from music to math to medicine to world affairs, I was running CNN and I didn't have a good feel for television. We were competing against other news channels and there was pressure to become more opinionated. Now, I'm not somebody who relishes being more opinionated.

• 1:04:26Speaker 03

  Likewise, I just wasn't that good. I'd look at a television personality or meet somebody and I'd have no idea whether they'd be successful hosting a show. And I realize there are times you push yourself to get out of your comfort zone, but there are also times when you're just out of your comfort zone and there's a reason because you're not good at something. And so I pretty much.

• 1:04:51Speaker 03

  Didn't succeed, you know, uh, during the years that I worked at CNN. Fox News came up, MSNBC came up. I think news became more partisan and distorted. And I was deeply uncomfortable during that period. I just kept saying, how do I, you know, how do I get out of this movie? And, um, I learned that you have to know in life what you're good at. And even though you have to push yourself sometimes beyond your comfort zones, you have to be able to say, you know, I'm not good at this particular thing, which is television. Secondly, I'm not good at managing huge numbers of people who have very strong needs,

• 1:05:36Speaker 03

  which tends to be what people on television have. And I don't want to do that anymore. And that's when I went to the Aspen Institute because it was a search for a deeper meaning in life. And I could get away from the hurly burly of cable television and have a more reflective, thoughtful period with people like the Henry Crown Fellows, you know, and other people at the Institute, who were doing worthy projects. And I just learned I had to not try to be the most famous, successful TV executive in the world, but go to a place where in my heart I was more comfortable.

• 1:06:15Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you for that.

• 1:06:18Tim Ferriss?

  And on a, on an ongoing basis, what do you do when you're feeling overwhelmed or unfocused? Is there?

• 1:06:27Speaker 03

  Well, one of the things I do is a life hack from Leonardo, which is, geez, I've learned the value of making a list. And by the way, doing it on paper, even though, like you, I love all sorts of new media and was there at the early 1990s trying to create online and then web services and love social networks and everything else. Every now and then a leather bound notebook filled with nice paper with a list of things that are bothering you, a list of things you still have to do, a list of people you have to make it up to because somehow you brushed them off on something. Uh, you put that on paper and then you get to go back a year later and say, oh yeah,

• 1:07:11Speaker 03

  here's how I, and Ben Franklin did that, but most of all Leonardo did that. One of the joys of writing about him was going around the world and as you said, there are more than 7,000 pages left of his notebooks. Bill Gates has some, there's some in Paris and Venice, nice places to go look. And I look at those lists he made and I say, okay, whenever I'm overwhelmed, let me make a list and let me do like Leonardo did and Ben Franklin did, save a part of the page for how I'm going to rectify these things.

• 1:07:44Tim Ferriss?

  So it seems like Ben Franklin, based on your description, uh, really kept track of his errata in the sense that he would, uh, he would sort of filch on his, uh, his promises related to the apprenticeship and then many years later come back to that errata and rectify it. Uh, for Leonardo or for yourself, how much of the therapeutic value is in simply putting it down on paper versus doing something with the information on paper?

• 1:08:15Speaker 03

  Well, to start with Leonardo, he, uh, never really completed any of the treatises he was going to do. And I think it's a failing of his, a small failing, is that he was so curious about everything that he actually never sort of added to the great wealth of knowledge at the time by finishing something for publication, uh, which I think would be more satisfying. For me, if something's on a notebook page that I want to do, or it's on my bucket list, or I've got a rectify list, if it stays there unrectified or undone...

• 1:08:57Speaker 03

  It's there on the page, making me feel guilty every day. And so it's nice to flip back and say, you know, I still gotta do this. And I think a record, having a record on paper. I mean, with all due respect to, you know, Twitter and Facebook and stuff. They may be like MySpace, which is fifty years from now, you know, only you and I remember what MySpace was. You know, we can't retrieve those pages. The good thing about doing them in a nice notebook, or even a notebook you can buy at the CVS, is that they're there. There's a certain permanence to paper. It is a great, great technology, paper is, for the storage and retrieval of information.

• 1:09:41Tim Ferriss?

  And if we're looking at the, not just the storage and retrieval, but imparting of information, looking at teaching. You've had a lot of exposure to teaching yourself, both personally, but as Chair Emeritus, Teach for America. I mean, you have a lot of exposure to education. And I would view your books certainly as a medium for teaching in a lot of respects. If you were able to give three books to every, say, graduating high school senior or college senior to aid them in their future, are there any particular books that come to mind? And one can be one of yours.

• 1:10:25Speaker 03

  Oh, no.

• 1:10:26Tim Ferriss?

  But no more than one.

• 1:10:27Speaker 03

  At least do the pretense of humility, which is not mine. I would actually go back to some of the classics. I mean, you know, everybody, of course, should be familiar with the Bible, which is a way of being taught through both parables and tales of people and their values. But The Odyssey is a particularly important one, because I think life is an odyssey. And especially as you're young and you're coming out of college, you gotta travel, you gotta get on the road, you gotta connect with different types of people and have adventures. There's something beautiful about The Odyssey, because Ulysses is on the boat, and then he'll have this incredible adventure. But then he gets to get back on the boat and move on.

• 1:11:12Speaker 03

  It allows him to be both engaged, but also a bit distracted. And of course, the other book you'd give is very, very similar. Which is Huckleberry Finn. He gets on that raft, gets off of it, gets engaged and has adventures. And when something happens, it's about time to get on the raft and move on. And so that ability to learn through travel is something I discovered Leonardo did in his notebooks. And if I were giving somebody coming out of college, I'd say, I know you want to get on with your career. But read The Odyssey, read Huckleberry Finn, read Ken Kesey's On the Bus. Or On the Road, I mean.

• 1:11:51Speaker 03

  And, um, uh, uh, and Jack Kerouac, I should say, and all the others. Who felt that by exploring and getting on the road, it connected them better to humanity. And thus eventually set them on the path for what Walker Percy called the search. Which is, okay, how do I fit into all this?

• 1:12:16Tim Ferriss?

  I have a friend who, uh, rereads or listens to The Odyssey every year. He's, uh, I believe, I'm pretty sure I'm getting, matching this factoid correctly to Neil Strauss. Who's a seven or eight time New York Times bestselling author, used to write for, maybe still does, the New York Times, Rolling Stone. And he, he views it as that important, uh, for himself, uh, that he revisits.

• 1:12:38Speaker 03

  Well, he, he outdoes me in that regard then. Uh, I'd love to know what, what, you know, everybody's favorite translation is too. Cause the cool thing about the, I mean, I like the Fagels translation. But the cool thing about The Odyssey is, you know, different people. It is, you know, get to, uh, make it their own in a way. Just like, uh, biographer, the many biographers of Leonardo. We each get to have our own Leonardo and play that piece of music in our own way. Great translators can play The Odyssey in different ways.

• 1:13:12Tim Ferriss?

  And your, your favorite translation was by Fagel, you said?

• 1:13:16Speaker 03

  Uh, Fagels, F A G E L S. And, um, blanking on his name now, but an old professor I once had, uh, uh, John Finley, uh, did some great translations too.

• 1:13:31Tim Ferriss?

  I'll have to find out from Neil. And, um, if, if you look back at the, at the books you've gifted the most to other people? And could certainly, I'll just have to make the allowance, I could certainly include your own, but are there any that fall outside of the Bible, the Odyssey, Huckleberry Finn?

• 1:13:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, I do give Walker Percy books out a lot. I also think the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin is cool, because like I said, with Leonardo and Ben Franklin, they're putting things on paper, and that autobiography is, sort of casts as a letter to a son, it's not some deep, you know, ruminations and things, and it's about how you make yourself, how you make your way through this world. Other gifted books, I just gave a copy of Kurt Anderson's Fantasyland to a friend, because I think it helps you understand the wackiness happening in our country today.

• 1:14:32Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you. And we're segueing into sort of the tail end of this conversation, I could keep going for hours, but I won't do that, because I know you have a party to get to. But the, the new behavior or belief that has most helped you in the last year or several years, or it could be a behavior or belief that you abandoned, does anything come to mind?

• 1:14:55Speaker 03

  Um, new behavior?

• 1:14:58Tim Ferriss?

  Or belief?

• 1:14:58Speaker 03

  Or belief. Um, I think, I gave up, as I said, watching television, and I mean, it was just a new behavior, as much as possible, you know, here in our house in New Orleans, or whatever, we don't have a television set. It means when I want to watch the Saints game, I actually go to a wonderful place where people are drinking beer, and get to do it as a communal endeavor. And I find it also lowers my blood pressure, because I think that, you know, our country's going through a really weird period, but if I'm

• 1:15:39Speaker 03

  not watching it every night on cable news or something, I try to put it in perspective better. So that's the behavioral change that in the past few years has centered my life a little bit better.

• 1:15:59Tim Ferriss?

  If you could have a giant billboard anywhere with anything on it, metaphorically speaking, just getting a message out to millions or billions of people, what would it say? And why? Could be a few words or a paragraph, could be someone else's quote. Anything goes.

• 1:16:13Speaker 03

  Well, it would be, to go back to the theme of this conversation, to stay curious. Steve Jobs loved the last edition of the old Whole Earth Catalog, you know, that wonderful 60s and 70s publication. And it was just, on the back of it was just a road, like the type of road you'd stumble across hitchhiking. And it said, "Stay hungry, stay foolish." And another way of saying that is, "Stay curious, stay observant." That's what separated Leonardo and Einstein and Ben Franklin from the rest of us, was

• 1:16:56Speaker 03

  that even in their 20s, even in their 30s, even in the 50s and 60s, they were always wide-eyed, not only being curious about things, but being open and observant to the beauty of things and the beauty of nature's and God's creations. And I think we either we start losing our curiosity fast when we're young kids and either our teachers or our parents say, "Quit asking so many questions," or "That's a dumb question."

• 1:17:37Speaker 03

  And then, as we go through life, we naturally, it drains a little bit from us, that curiosity that a child has. And if I say, "What do I find on Leonardo's notebook pages?" To the very end of his life, he's got a childlike curiosity. Einstein once said, "I don't have any special talents, but I still have my childlike curiosity." Which is why I wonder what it would be like to ride alongside a light beam. Why I wonder, you know, about how gravity makes things move. And Leonardo, the last page we have of his notebook...

• 1:18:21Speaker 03

  You know, just a simple page, got all sorts of sketches. But it also, near the two thirds of the way down the page, he's got four little drawings where he's got geometric shapes. And he's still trying to figure out, how do you do that puzzle of squaring the circle? And he writes it, and he has a little chart showing how he's done it. And then the last line, it breaks off and he says, "But the soup is getting cold." And you just picture him there upstairs in his study, and the cook downstairs with all of his students and friends down there, calling him and say, "Coming, come on down. The soup is getting cold." And on his deathbed in Princeton, New Jersey,

• 1:19:06Speaker 03

  Albert Einstein, for forty years, had been trying to do something like Leonardo tried to do, square the circle. But for Einstein, it was create the unified theory, a theory that would unify the forces of gravity with the forces of quantum mechanics and electromagnetism, and have a unified field. And you just see, he, like Leonardo, gets two thirds of down the page with all sorts of equations, you know, even a couple of math mistakes which he fixes. And then, you know, he's having a heart problems, the pain becomes too great, and the last equation dribbles off to the bottom of the page as he tried to just get one step closer, both for himself and for the rest of us,

• 1:19:51Speaker 03

  to the spirit that's manifest in the laws of the universe. That notion that there's a spirit manifest in the beauty of the universe is what Leonardo was doing on his last notebook page and Einstein. And that's part of the search. You know, if we're all on some search for the deeper meaning, those are little clues, little, I'll call them, path markers or guideposts of how we should pursue the search.

• 1:20:27Tim Ferriss?

  Well, that is a beautiful way, I think, to tie a bow on top of this very wide-ranging and extremely fun conversation.

• 1:20:36Speaker 03

  You know, it's wonderful talking to you.

• 1:20:37Tim Ferriss?

  You too.

• 1:20:38Speaker 03

  You have a great curiosity and you have a great love for things and, I don't know, as I said, you know, I started off with the four-hour work week and, you know, all those cooking things, but in the end, you just realize that for you and the rest of us, partly, we're just guided by wanting to know a little bit more and experience a little bit more.

• 1:21:01Tim Ferriss?

  And I'm really glad that you, much like the people you cover, seem to have occasionally an obsessive fascination with digging into the details and pulling out what makes these people tick and what guides them, what drives them, what pulls them or attracts them, and it's a real service, so I thank you for putting it together.

• 1:21:24Speaker 03

  Well, it's like my mentor said, be a storyteller, and that's all I'm trying to do with Leonardo da Vinci, is whoa, this is the most interesting story you can imagine, let me tell you the story.

• 1:21:35Tim Ferriss?

  So certainly, everybody should check out Leonardo da Vinci. It's absolutely going to do, I'm sure, great things, and I would, if people have liked your previous writing, they should definitely check out Leonardo da Vinci. Aside from that, do you have any parting comments or suggestions, any call to action, anything like that for the people listening? Could be anything. Certainly, in the show notes, I will link to everything we've talked about, including Leonardo da Vinci, but aside from that, is there anything that you would like them to do or consider?

• 1:22:13Speaker 03

  Well, I did talk about being, you know, greater curiosity, and we also talked about something you and I and many people understand, which is gratitude, because I think the grace that comes from gratitude makes you feel like you want to pay it forward a bit, help others, and we're living in perilous times. I'm moving back to New Orleans, because I think it's important to reconnect with your home communities, and in doing so, by reconnecting with your communities, maybe we can heal just a little bit of this divisive... ...type of culture that we've allowed ourselves to sink into.

• 1:22:56Speaker 03

  That's not so much a call to action, but it's just a way to maybe realize, as you would by reading a Leonardo da Vinci or an Einstein, that there are larger things in this world, and there are more things that unite us in our spirit than divide us.

• 1:23:17Tim Ferriss?

  Well, Walter, it's such a pleasure to spend some time with you, and people can certainly say hello to you on Facebook, Walter Isaacson, Twitter, @WalterIsaacson. And to everybody listening, I'll link to everything, including the new book, Leonardo da Vinci. Just to give you an idea, you have the most insanely incredible blurbs and critic reviews of your books. I have such jealousy. "A monumental tribute to a Titanic figure" publishes weekly. "Majestic. Isaacson takes on another complex giant figure and transforms him into someone we can recognize. Enthralling, masterful, and passionate." That's Kirk's reviews. I'm

• 1:23:58Tim Ferriss?

  really excited to see what this will do for all the people who will no doubt read it. And once again, really appreciate you taking the time, Walter.

• 1:24:08Speaker 03

  Thank you, Tim.

• 1:24:10Tim Ferriss?

  And to everybody listening, as per usual, you can find links to everything in the show notes at tim.blog/podcast for this episode and every other episode. And until next time, thanks so much for listening. Hey, guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts

• 1:24:53Tim Ferriss?

  of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric, as I do. It could include a favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it.