Bonus: Walter Isaacson on Bending the Arch of History and Demystifying Science

Today’s episode of the podcast is from a February 2021 interview with Ryan Holiday and prolific bestselling author Walter Isaacson. They talk about his newest book The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race, the brilliant execution that it took to create the first Coronavius vaccine, demystifying the scientific narrative through a journey of discovery, and more. For THREE MORE DAYS, you can sign up and immediately begin the 2022 Daily Stoic New Year New You Challenge at your own pace. It’s 3 weeks of actionable challenges, presented in an email per day, built around the best, most timeless wisdom in Stoic philosophy. Just go to https://dailystoic.com/challenge to sign up. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://DailyStoic.com/dailyemailCheck out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more. Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

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

• 0:03Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these Stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal,

• 0:46Ryan Holiday?

  and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring.

• 0:53Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. We've got a special bonus episode for you today. I thought this was lost in the ether and I didn't get a recording of it. That's why it's coming to you now, months after it happened. But it was such a fun interview to do, and I think an important interview to do, and it was a chance for me to talk to a hero and a great influence on me as a writer, the one and only Walter Isaacson. I had a chance to interview him as part of an elite private group called Beyond Labels, which I was invited to by a guy named Zachary Todd. He emailed me in February and said, hey, last minute,

• 1:34Ryan Holiday?

  but do you want to interview Walter Isaacson? And I said, uh, yeah, I do. So here is my interview with Walter Isaacson about his great book, The Codebreaker: Jennifer Doudna, Chain Editing in the Future.

• 1:52Ryan Holiday?

  Of the human race. And we talk about a whole bunch of stuff, takes you way back to see where we were. You see some of the current events we're talking about back in February. But this interview with Walter was a dream of mine because as I tell him, I used his DaVinci book in my writing. I used his Steve Jobs book in obstacle. I've used his Benjamin Franklin book in ego. I really liked his book, The Wise Men, Six Friends and the World They Made, which I read, I guess, late last year, also used in some of my writing. You may have seen Jennifer Doudna pop up in some of the Daily Dad emails we've done, in the Daily Stoic emails we've done. Walter has such an eye for anecdotes and insights and explaining what makes great

• 2:37Ryan Holiday?

  people great, how they do what they do. And that's why I was very excited to chat with him as part of this. And so I'm presenting this as a bonus episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. This is me in conversation with the one and only Walter Isaacson. Thanks to Beyond Labels for bringing us together. And do check out his new book, Codebreaker, Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, The Future of the Human Race.

• 3:06Speaker 01

  And I had written most of the book by about a year and a half ago, but was still working on updating it. And I said, well, a couple of things could happen. I'm going to wait for the October 2020 Nobel Prize because if we're lucky, it might go to the CRISPR inventors, whoever they pick. And then, as I was writing the epilogue, as you can see from reading the epilogue, I was on the balcony right behind me, looking at the diversity of people on Royal Street here in the French Quarter, and thinking about what CRISPR could mean. And that's when the COVID crisis, that's when the shutdown happened.

• 3:48Speaker 01

  And I decided to delay the book because clearly the notion that an RNA-based virus that was going to be fought by an RNA-based vaccine and detected by RNA-based CRISPR technology. And eventually, I think our viruses, we're not going to fight them with vaccines. That uses our kind of weird, tricky immune system. We should do what bacteria have done for a billion years. And they're not much smarter than we are, which is just have a system that attacks the virus directly rather than tries to churn up our immune system.

• 4:29Speaker 01

  So I spent, you know, the past year or so writing that part of the book. But compared to most things, it wasn't a rush. It was a nice, easygoing thing. The other thing about it being at the time of coronavirus, I had traveled around, been to Berlin in Emmanuel Sharpenj's lab, spent a lot of time in Doudna's lab in Berkeley. But I got to hang around in real time because everybody was there all meeting with Slack and Zoom. So I'm meeting and I'm getting to hang at the whole teams out at Doudna lab working on coronavirus, just every day, monitoring their Zoom meetings, lurking in their Slack

• 5:11Speaker 01

  channels, same with some people at MIT and Harvard. So it was a new form of reporting to watch it unfold in real time.

• 5:20Ryan Holiday?

  There's something sort of swimming up against the stream of the Big Easy in your sort of prolificness and your, yeah, your prolificness.

• 5:33Speaker 01

  Wait, I don't need a lecture in prolificness from Ryan Holiday.

• 5:37Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I remember when I was living in New Orleans, writing my first book, I didn't tell anyone. There's sort of an embarrassing thing when you decide to be, to write a book because you don't know if it's going to work and everyone's going to tell you it's a terrible idea. So I didn't tell anyone and I met all these new friends when I lived in New Orleans. And when the book announcement came out, everyone was very surprised. They said, I didn't know you were a writer. And I remember asking, well, what do you think I was doing? And their answer was nothing. They just assumed I was another person in New Orleans just hanging out. So I've got to imagine that, that at the very least, COVID was, was good for you in the sense that it's so easy to be distracted in New Orleans. There's so many amazing things to do. You did have. A sort of a solid year of the writer's life to perfect this this thing with fewer distractions.

• 6:22Speaker 01

  Well, yes, and it allowed me to focus, but more importantly,

• 6:31Speaker 01

  CRISPR, gene editing technology and biotechnology in general and treating, you know, and the life sciences. It was fascinating to me, but suddenly it brought home the importance of it. It was like a noble calling suddenly. And I watched as the competitors in this race to get the patents and the prizes for CRISPR, meaning mainly Feng Zhang's group and Jennifer Dowd and Emmanuel Chopinjay's group, having been in a really tough competition, then said, OK, we're turning our attention to fighting the coronavirus and we're going to publish our papers openly online and not assert intellectual property rights,

• 7:15Speaker 01

  but allow people to just build on these papers to fight the coronavirus. And it was a reminder to me, and I think to them and to the young people working in their labs, their graduate students, that this isn't just about patents and prizes. This is about humanity. And so it gave, I had started this book thinking that biotechnology and the life sciences was an exciting endeavor with colorful characters, pursuing amazing adventures. And as I got some time to focus on what was happening to our society, I realized I was understating the case. It's more important. It's more of a noble cause.

• 7:52Ryan Holiday?

  Well, actually, I read another one of your books during the pandemic that that I felt some strong resonance with as I was reading this one, which is, you know, in The Wise Men, you talk about the sort of the best and the brightest of a generation coming to serve their country in the Second World War and then in the Cold War, and then a little bit in Vietnam. And it struck me that this was a slightly less violent, but nevertheless, sort of same coming, all hands on deck of a generation of of brilliant people to solve a problem that's affecting all of humanity for really at at great opportunity cost. That all these people could have been focused on other projects that might have made them a lot more money,

• 8:35Ryan Holiday?

  but they chose to to sort of serve a greater cause.

• 8:39Speaker 01

  You know, one of the things we talked about in the Cold War and afterwards, or when we were writing about it, is that, you know, we have a lot of nations that are always struggling, competing, sometimes great rivalries. But if there were ever an attack from a different planet, you know, and some alien civilization came to get us, that we would probably bond together as a planet. And that's happening, of course, now with climate change. But coronavirus was the same thing. It happened not only to make us cooperate more internationally, or should have, but it's also made for the collaboration versus the competition side of science to ascend a little bit more. So I do think it reminds us of the nobility of that mission.

• 9:24Speaker 01

  When Steve Jobs was, you know, this summer of 2011, and it was clear he wasn't going to make it, I remember sitting in his backyard and saying, you know, what was it all about? You know, what do you think the purpose was? And he said, you know, in studying my Zen studies, I always thought life, like history, was a river. And part of life was how much you got to take out of that river. You got the ideas that people had put in before you, and the things they had made, and the wonderful devices. And if you were very successful, there was a lot of things you got to take out of that river. He said, "But now I realize it's not about what you get to take out of the river, it's what you get to put into the river."

• 10:05Speaker 01

  And I think the scientists who took up the case of fighting coronavirus, using the tools that they had developed from gene editing, from RNA programming of guide RNA and messenger RNA, all of those things helped remind them and us that we're in a pretty much of a larger fight, and that there's a privilege of what you get to put into the river.

• 10:29Ryan Holiday?

  I was, I was thinking of Steve Jobs as well. So I got my vaccine yesterday. I was volunteering, my wife and I have been volunteering at a vaccine clinic. And I got mine yesterday, my wife got hers about an hour ago. And as they were putting the shot in my arm, and, and I just, you know, spent the whole day watching, you know, ferrying people through the halls in wheelchairs, filling up paperwork. But on the one hand, there, it took this brilliant innovation, CRISPR and the vaccines and the scientific collaboration you're talking about. And then sort of how nuts and bolts, boots on the ground it was, like just having to get shots in thousands of people's arms and how we've struggled a little bit, we've actually struggled more with the second part of the equation than the first part of the

• 11:09Ryan Holiday?

  equation. And I wondered too, you know, part of what was so brilliant about Steve Jobs was he was also a logistical genius. But I was also thinking of Steve Jobs, that every Steve Jobs needs a Tim Cook as well, that there's a time for brilliant innovation, but then also a time for logistics.

• 11:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, when I asked Steve Jobs what the greatest product he ever made was, I thought he'd say either the iPhone or the Mac. And he said, no, making products like that's hard. But what's really hard is making a team that can continue to deliver such products. And the thing he said I did, he did best was making the team at Apple. And Tim Cook is very much of a part of that because, you know, vision without execution is hallucination. So you have to be able to execute. And I was down in Washington for a few days earlier this week, you know, with some of the people who've gone into the administration. And whatever your politics are, when you start talking to people like a Jeff Zients, or a Ron Klain,

• 12:11Speaker 01

  or Bruce Reed, or Kate Beddingfield, or whatever, that are trying to figure out this system. And I was there for the announcement that Merck and was going to manufacture the Johnson and Johnson's vaccine in, you know, collaboration with Johnson and Johnson, the two big competitors in the pharma business. You realize that we sometimes in this day and age make everything about politics. We make everything, you know, polarized or whatever. Well, 90% of government is not the, you know, is not the policy dispute. It's the execution. And I was quite impressed,

• 12:54Speaker 01

  if I may say so, with, you know, a team that, as the people I named, and Vivek Murthy, and so many other people, that are saying, how do we get Merck and Johnson and Johnson to work together? How do we make sure their refrigerated supply chains from beginning to end? So.

• 13:14Speaker 01

  We should admire those who actually can execute.

• 13:19Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, there's different kinds of genius, right? There's the brilliant visionary and then there's the person who can bring that vision to life. And sometimes that's the same person, sometimes it's not. It did feel like Jennifer is, has a mix of both of those things. She's able to build a team. She's, she's not just a theoretical thinker, but, but was able to think about what this could actually do.

• 13:44Speaker 01

  Here's what I write about on her building a team, which is not totally pure praise. And it's different than other people sometimes do. If I looked at Steve Jobs, he liked a lot of creative tension at times. I mean, he occasionally called people a jerk. Sometimes he used a more technical term that begins with an A. I mean, he got people at each other's throats. He loved them to fight and, you know, it was, it was a culture somewhat akin to Franklin Roosevelt's, you know, team at the White House with creative destruction at its core. And Jennifer Dowd told me that when she's hiring for her lab or inviting graduate students to become part of the lab

• 14:25Speaker 01

  or creating a company, she gets them all together and makes sure that they really like each other, to make sure that they, um, there's no tension between them and that there's a camaraderie. And I said, well, don't you lose out on some of the creative types, the ones who are going to be a disruptor? Don't you want some disruptive types on the team? And she said, yes, really great leaders probably do that, but I don't. I like it when we can get along and work collaboratively.

• 14:59Ryan Holiday?

  We chose to do something that we've never done here before at Daily Stoic. For one week only, you can sign up and immediately begin the 2022 New Year, New You Challenge at your own pace. We recorded, edited, time stamped my live Q and A's. That's three hours of me answering questions on a wide variety of topics, including how I applied Stoicism to my own life, my goals, my practices.

• 15:24Ryan Holiday?

  We talk about what to do when you're overwhelmed, when you've taken on too much, ways to rethink your habits, routines when life gets too chaotic, and so much more. You get the benefit of all the other people who've been through the challenge and what they've learned and shared as well. And additionally, the New Year, New You Challenge participants get 21 custom challenges delivered daily that will help you stop procrastinating, gain clarity on the life you want to live, learn new skills. Again, this is just for a week. If you procrastinated earlier in the year, if you told yourself you were going to get around to it and you missed it, well, you've got a second chance. You've been given a do-over, a reprieve. You can sign up at dailystoic.com/challenge. And as always, if you're a Daily Stoic Life member, that's dailystoiclife.com, you get

• 16:08Ryan Holiday?

  this challenge and all the challenges that we have planned for the year for free. So check that out, dailystoiclife.com, and of course, dailystoic.com/challenge.

• 16:18Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, there was a theme you talk about early in the book, the idea that a lot of brilliant visionaries, that that way of looking at the world comes from some sort of early alienation, some sense of feeling different or unusual. And so I could imagine that takes you two ways as a leader. Either you thrive on a sort of alienated, conflict-oriented environment, or you want it to be peaceful and everyone gets along and we're all friends.

• 16:44Speaker 01

  You know, Ryan, that's a really good insight, and I wish I'd had it myself. But since this is a friendly crowd, next time I use that insight, I'll credit you. And the following times, I'll pretend it was my own insight. Because, I mean, even with the Henry Kissinger, who was the very first biography I did, he came out of the Holocaust. And you talk about coming out of an environment where you feel alien. You know, imagine being a pudgy Jewish, you know, 10-year-old growing up in the early 1930s in Firth and Germany. And there are two types of people who come out of that experience. There are people like Eli Vazell, who come out of it feeling, you know, never again, and with a moral...

• 17:30Speaker 01

  A strong moral streak that informs them. Or there are people like a Henry Kissinger come out with a real feel for power. And they're never going to be in a situation where they can't feel that they can handle the balances of power. And they won't put themselves in positions where they're powerless again. So, yeah, those of us who are biographers, we always look for that, what happened when they were six, eight, nine years old, as a way, as the key, as that rosebud moment in Citizen Kane, that's the key to the biography. And, you know, whether it's Einstein, my book sort of has his father giving him a compass. And he's mesmerized, you know, about why the needle points north when nothing's touching

• 18:15Speaker 01

  it and always trying to figure out what a force. And you and I remember getting compasses when we were, you know, six, seven years old and like, oh, wow, it points north. And then we're outside walking, oh, look, a dead squirrel. And we forget about the compass. But Einstein, for his whole life, is mesmerized by the question of a force field. And Steve Jobs, it was building a fence around the backyard of his house. And his father made him put this side of the fence that faced the woods that nobody would see, make it as beautiful as the front. And Steve always believed in the power of the beauty unseen. And so all of the people have these sort of moments. And for Jennifer, it was growing up as a tall, lanky blonde kid when every other kid

• 18:55Speaker 01

  in her class was Polynesian because she was in a small town in Hawaii and being curious about every little thing but feeling alienated. So like, you know, Leonardo, who comes from the village of Vinci to the town of Florence, and he's born out of wedlock, he's gay, he's left-handed, he's distracted. You spend a lot of the time saying, okay, here's this cosmos, how do I fit in?

• 19:24Ryan Holiday?

  I was, when I read your books, one of the things that, and I got to imagine you can't be a biographer and not think this, because otherwise, what would be the point? But each one of your books is about a single person, although this one's about, obviously, more than one person, but it's about a single person who changed the world, who changed the course of human history through their own brilliance and willpower and ambition. But that, it's weird in our today's conversation, where everything is structural, or systemic, or institutional, the idea that the great man or great woman of history theory exists is sort of passe, but you seem like you deeply believe that an individual can make a difference.

• 20:06Speaker 01

  Well, they can. And as you know, this, since you've written about the Stoics and the Epicureans or whatever, this has been a debate that's been going on since Thucydides, about to what extent the great forces of, you know, shape history, and to what extent individuals can ripple the surface of history. And very beginning, the first epigraph of my Henry Kissinger book, is something I found in a confidential file from his shuttle missions when he was in the Middle East. And he said to a group of people on the plane, "When I was a professor of history at Harvard, I thought that history was shaped by great forces.

• 20:47Speaker 01

  But now that I see it up close, I see the difference that an individual can make." He was pretending to be talking about Sadat and Golda Meir, but I think he was also talking about himself. But it's true that history is a mix of great forces, but also people who are able to bend that arc of history. Whether it's Dr. King or Dr. Doudna, they touch the arc of history and they're able to move it a little bit.

• 21:15Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, we were talking about sort of the the the Rosebud moment. I think about that line about Theodore Roosevelt, a biographer said, you know, he read about the great men of history and and believed that he could be just like them. I I love that this is a book about a woman who changed history because it's I think it's important for everyone to be able to see that that it's really that a human being can change or touch the arc of history. It has nothing to do with gender. It just has to do with with with those traits that allows one to to be great.

• 21:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, although women have been written out of the history of science and technology, as Esther will knows all that well, and we've talked about it quite a bit. And so there aren't quite as many role models. When Jennifer was in sixth grade, she comes home and her dad has left on bed, The Double Helix, Jim Watson's book. And Jennifer thought it was a detective story, picks it up on Saturday, and realize it is a detective story about the chase for the greatest secrets ever. And she reads the book, and what strikes her is this character known as, quote, Rosie, something Rosalind Franklin never called herself, but Jim Watson calls her Rosie in a condescending way. And I asked her about it. She said, Yeah, I guess it was a condescending

• 22:36Speaker 01

  treatment of Rosalind Franklin. But for me, it was the very first time, believe it or not, that I realized a girl could be a scientist. And so she decided from reading that book that she wanted to pursue science. And her guidance counselor at school said, No, girls don't become scientists. But she persisted. So I think it's important, yes, to make sure that people from all walks of life, you know, and all backgrounds get to realize that they can ripple the surface of history and touch it, too. But it's also important to have role models.

• 23:12Ryan Holiday?

  Was that something you consciously thought about, having written biographies of so many powerful men, that you wanted to try writing about someone different? Or was this just naturally the story that presented itself?

• 23:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a good question. And in some ways, I can answer. I mean, I wanted to write about the biotech and life science revolution. I was kicking it around for a long time. I'd written about the physics revolution of the first half of the 20th century, beginning with Einstein's papers. That gives us everything from atom bombs to, you know, semi-processors to, you know, GPS and space travel. I had written about the next revolution of innovation, which was the digital revolution, both with the innovators and Steve Jobs. And that's when the microchip, the computer and the network all converged. So I knew my next book was going to be about the third great wave of innovation, which

• 24:07Speaker 01

  is in the life sciences, beginning to some extent with the Human Genome Project and, you know, making it the first half of the 21st century. And there are a lot of characters, one of whom, of course, is on this Zoom meeting, who could be great biographies and great central characters for such a journey of discovery. I had met Jennifer Doudna a few times, our pass, cross at Aspen, many other things. Mercedes will remember her. I think I interviewed her on stage six or seven years ago at the institute.

• 24:45Speaker 01

  And the more I heard about her and her story, it had that element of a woman, you know, triumphing in the fields of science, triumphing in collaboration, because she was kind of left out a bit of the Human Genome Project and DNA. So she and Jillian Banfield and Emmanuel Sharp and Jay, they're all focusing on RNA, as are some men like Jack Shostak or advisor. But, you know, she's going where the soccer ball isn't. And then she does a lot of good work on RNA structure, and then is the co-developer of the CRISPR technology, and then throws herself into the policy and ethical debates internationally on this.

• 25:29Speaker 01

  So she turned out to be a great narrative thread, but I hope in the book... She's the narrative thread, but George Church, as I mentioned, who's on this call, Fong Zhang, Emmanuel Sharp and Jay, Gillian Banfield, they're all major characters in the book and they deserve books and movies of their own. And one of the things George pushed on me early on in this project is that the real heroes of CRISPR, and we'll get into later why that phrase has a resonance, were the graduate students. So there's a lot in this book about Martin Yenak and Kristof Cholinsky and Le Cong and

• 26:11Speaker 01

  Jennifer Hamilton and Enrico Lin Chao and the people who really did the work at the bench.

• 26:18Ryan Holiday?

  I had one last question for you and then we should open it up to the audience. But I would guess everyone on this call is a cheerleader of science, a believer in science, a believer in innovation and change. I saw this meme, actually, I think I saw it this morning, and it said, you know, 90 scientists, and it said, you know, we've mapped the human genome, we've cloned a sheep, you know, we've done these things. And then it was like, today's scientists, we're telling you for the last time, the earth is round. You know, we're experiencing, in parallel to these massive breakthroughs, we're also experiencing a backlash against science or a hesitancy against science.

• 27:01Ryan Holiday?

  What sort of thoughts do you have or advice do you have to people who are like yourself trying to evangelize these ideas or just trying to talk to an uncle who, you know, has been sucked into the Facebook algorithm?

• 27:12Speaker 01

  Well, I hope we all have antidotes to that in our daily lives. And my antidote was to write this book. I mean, the backlash against science and expertise isn't new. It's been going on for 10, 15 years. And, you know, anti-vaxxers existed even before there were coronavirus vaccines. And so I wrote this book because I believe if you demystify something, it becomes less conspiratorial, less frightening. And so the best way to demystify science is to make it a narrative, a journey of discovery.

• 27:51Speaker 01

  And so my book is intended to go hand in hand with me and Jennifer Doudna and a dozen, you know, dozens of other people as we go on a journey of discovery. And as you do that, you say, okay, I now get that science is not only a noble pursuit, it's a beautiful pursuit. And nature is pretty awesome. And if you understand it, you become less of a reactionary against science. So each of us makes a small contribution, but without seeming arrogant, I hope this book is a, you know, small contribution to this cause.

• 28:35Speaker 01

  Anybody who reads this book, I promise you, they may not love the book, but they will be more pro-science at the end of reading this book.

• 28:47Ryan Holiday?

  I love that.

• 28:48Speaker 01

  They will realize that heroes don't always wear capes. They sometimes wear lab coats.

• 28:55Ryan Holiday?

  I love that.

• 28:58Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple of years we've been doing it. It's an honor. Please spread the word, tell people about it. And this isn't to sell anything, I just wanted to say thank you.