Hubris, Humility, and the AI Revolution (with Walter Isaacson)

The people building artificial intelligence worry there’s a real chance it could doom us all. So why do they keep building anyway? Walter Isaacson, biographer extraordinaire, talks with EconTalk’s Russ Roberts about why the AI innovators feel trapped in a race none of them can pause. Drawing on The Builders, a new podcast he’s launched, Isaacson explains why so many of these innovators see humility and empathy as handicaps rather than virtues, and why he worries they’re pouring their talent into autonomous agents that leave humans out of the loop. Isaacson traces today’s AI debate back to the rival visions of Alan Turing and Ada Lovelace, reveals why Elon Musk once told him his empathy was really vanity, and recalls Benjamin Franklin’s surprising lesson about faking humility. Plus: a Marie Curie story involving a secret affair and a second Nobel Prize.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host, Russ Roberts of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Go to econTalk.org where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links to other information related to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006. Our email address is [email protected]. We'd love to hear from you. Today is October 15, 2026, and my guest is author Walter Isaacson. He has written numerous books, including celebrated biographies of Da Vinci, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Elon Musk,

• 0:47Speaker 00

  and others. His book on the digital revolution, The Innovators, has a new edition out. And he has just released a new podcast series, The Builders, where he interviews innovators and people on the front line of the AI revolution: Elon Musk, Dario and Danielle Amadé, Peter Thiel, Palmer Lucky, Alex Karp, and others. I want to start. Walter, welcome to Econ Talk.

• 1:10Speaker 01

  Thank you so much. Good to be here.

• 1:12Speaker 00

  You write that your book, The Innovators, chronicles how the digital revolution was created, not only by advances in machine intelligence, but also by improvements in the way that humans connect with machines. You go on to say, "Today's explosive new AI revolution has divided the tech world into two camps, which can be called the Turing camp and the Ada camp," a reference to Ada Lovelace. Describe those two camps and what's different about them. What's their two different visions of the world?

• 1:42Speaker 01

  What Ada Lovelace said back in the 1840s was that the strength of what she called punch cards and digital computers that she helped envision would be the connection of computers to humans. And the human-computer interface became sort of the guiding force of especially the personal computer revolution. A hundred years after Ada wrote that, Alan Turing wrote his famous paper called, you know, Can Machines Think?, The Computing Machines and Intelligence paper in 1950. And he called that Ada Lovelace's objection

• 2:25Speaker 01

  because Ada said, "Machines will never think on their own. They will think best in partnership with humans." And Turing said, "No, at some point, we'll have artificial intelligence, and machines will be able to think without humans." And so, in some ways, there's been two camps, what I would call the Ada Lovelace, Doug Engelbart, Steve Jobs camp, that basically says when we connect humans to machines, what we will get is better than if we just try humans alone or just try machines alone. It's called the symbiosis. And our new revolution in artificial general intelligence, especially when it comes to agents, agentic intelligence,

• 3:10Speaker 01

  is trying to create agents that can be autonomous and work without humans. And that goes against the grain of what Steve Jobs, Ada Lovelace, Doug Engelbart, Alan Kay, and others felt was important about the computer revolution.

• 3:24Speaker 00

  In your book, The Innovators, you tend to, you say in your new preface, you're in the Ada camp. This tradition, quote, "This tradition holds that there will always be a role for human creativity, intention, agency, empathy, and even consciousness. The greatest gains will not come from machines working alone, but from a symbiosis that connects machine processing power with human creativity." I love that. I'm a big fan of it. There's evidence for it and limited evidence for it in the world so far. Obviously, the innovators you interviewed for your podcast series might have a different view. I'm curious if that was, if they're more in the Turing camp or the Ada camp.

• 4:08Speaker 01

  That's a good question. And I have this series called The Builders, in which I've interviewed everybody from, you know, Peter Thiel and Alex Karp, who are applying AI to real-world situations, to people like Dario Amadé, Danielle Amadé, Elon Musk, who are creating Mustafa Suleyman, all creating AI systems. And I think that most of the people now creating the major five or six frontier model AI systems, such as Anthropic, OpenAI, Grok, and Gemini, are working, and I guess Meta is up there too with Muse, are working

• 4:51Speaker 01

  very hard on creating autonomous agents. And so, they believe that it's better off to leave humans out of the loop. And I try to push back on them in the podcast, The Builders, with a simple question of, "Why are you doing all this? What's the point of an artificial intelligence that leaves humans out of the loop? I mean, what's the point of any technology we build?" And I think the basic answer to that question is to serve humanity, to make life better for humans. And I'm not sure some of the people in The Builders believe that, but we have pretty robust discussions where I try to push them a bit towards my view.

• 5:35Speaker 00

  I know a number of mathematicians who are a little bit worried about how much human flourishing they'll be doing in the world that's about, as we're already in the middle of it right now, and it's probably going to get more extreme. There are some mathematicians who are not worried about it. I've got an interview coming up with David Becis on that. But people are worried that a lot of occupations that are the source of human meaning are going to be eliminated. Again, I'm an optimist on this, but I think I'm in the minority to a large extent. Where do you come down on that? And how did the conversations you had with The Builders affect your views of it all?

• 6:15Speaker 01

  I've always believed that technology, almost by definition, increases human productivity. And of course, if it does that, it creates more wealth for society, and there's more things that can be, that wealth can be used on. And humans are never going to run out of desires and, you know, want things. And so, I think technology has always in the past and will in the future lead to a growth in the number of potential jobs. But it will certainly be disruptive. We never know what's going to be disruptive necessarily. A hundred and 20 years ago, we went through another period of great technological disruption,

• 6:58Speaker 01

  and they invent the automobile and the extraction industry of oil and gas, and they invent telephones and light bulbs and electricity.

• 7:06Speaker 00

  Airplanes.

• 7:07Speaker 01

  Airplanes. Well, that puts buggy whip makers out of work and candle makers out of work, but it produced an incredible leap in the number of jobs. The Luddites who smashed the looms in England that Ada Lovelace was writing about, they thought the looms, the automated looms, would put people out of work. But by, you know, a few decades later, there was 10 times the number of people in England in the textile industry. So, the question is not whether it will reduce the total number of jobs. I do not think that artificial intelligence will. But I do think it disrupts jobs, and we don't know what

• 7:45Speaker 01

  jobs it will disrupt. As you say, suddenly, it's disrupting the jobs of theoretical mathematicians because they have a little bit fewer problems to solve. It's disrupting the job of coders. When I started teaching history at Tulane about five, six years ago, parents would come to me and say, "I'm glad people are taking your history course, but I don't want them to major in history. I want them to major in computer science and learn how to code so they'll have a job." Well, now Claude will code better than they do. But if you understand the connection of humans to machines, if you understand history, you understand

• 8:26Speaker 01

  human emotions, you also understand science and math and technology, you're more likely to see the patterns across nature and be prepared, when jobs get disrupted, be prepared to create the new jobs.

• 8:38Speaker 00

  I'll just reference the satirical petition of the candle makers by Frédéric Bocciot, which was a complaint humorous, meant humorously, that the sun was an unfair competitor to candles and that we should block up all windows. But I would just add in your point that it was bad for candle makers when electricity spread, but we still have candles. We still have quite a few candles, actually. I'd be interested to see if total candle production and consumption, I'm guessing, is quite a bit larger than it was in 1900. But, well, maybe someone will look into that. I want to ask you about Apple. You reeled

• 9:16Speaker 00

  off a list of the firms at the frontier of the AI revolution. We know who they are. Apple's not on that list. Are you surprised if Steve Jobs were alive?

• 9:29Speaker 01

  Well, I am somewhat surprised that Apple has, since Steve Jobs died, you know, more than 20 years ago, missed out on a lot of revolutions. It did not create a social media app, which I think Steve Jobs would have built around music at first, and created a social media app, probably one that was a lot better than Facebook or others in terms of not taking us down bad rabbit holes. It never quite developed TV. And Siri, the voice assistant, that was the last board meeting that Steve Jobs went to, was to look

• 10:09Speaker 01

  at Siri. And he envisioned, he talked about how that was going to be the human-computer interface. Like I said, connecting humans closely to machines for an era of artificial intelligence. But Apple didn't jump on AI. So, I'm a little bit surprised it's not been as in the forefront of this AI revolution.

• 10:33Speaker 00

  Do you think Steve Jobs, if he were alive today, would be as proud of the iPhone as he felt, seemed to be when he was alive at the end of his life?

• 10:42Speaker 01

  When I asked Steve at the end of his life what product he was most proud of, He, I thought he was gonna say the iPhone, or maybe the Macintosh. He said, well, creating the iPhone, creating the Mac, I'm proud of them. They were really great products. But what's really hard is to create a team that creates great products. And so he was proudest of the team he made, and that included Tim Cook, and Johnny Ive, and Eddie Q, and Phil Schiller, and so many people who knew how to work together, and can create, as he said, if you create the right team, they can create new products.

• 11:21Speaker 00

  So I loved your book, your biography of Jobs, and I wasn't gonna read it, because people told me, it's, you just find out he's a jerk. He was something of a jerk. He had a very difficult personality, he was a little bit of a narcissist. He was also a person who could assemble some of the greatest creative people of our time, and get them to work together, produce extraordinary products. How do you understand that? Is that just he managed to overcome his personality to do that? Or was that part of the whole thing?

• 11:53Speaker 01

  I think what Steve was able to do was he could drive people crazy. He could really be tough on them, and drive them insane. But he could also drive them to do things they never thought they could do. And in the end, they would be able to march through walls for him.

• 12:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:11Speaker 01

  Because they truly believed in his vision. They knew, as he said, we're going to make a dent in the universe. And so all the people who complained about how rough he could be on them, they were the ones most loyal to him.

• 12:29Speaker 00

  It's rather incredible. Say something about Neuralink. I'm sure some of our listeners don't know what that is. It's Elon Musk project. And which side of the story does that fit in, in your view of Turing versus Ada?

• 12:43Speaker 01

  Neuralink is the ultimate example, Neuralink is the ultimate example of a human-computer interface. When I talk about connecting humans most closely to machines, and saying that's the side I'm on, I don't want machines, my agents, to go wandering off without me, and escaping their sandboxes, and doing things without interacting and being iterative with me. That demands a good human-computer interface. That's a course they teach at Stanford, that Steve Jobs took, HCI. It's what Larry Page and Sergey took. So human-computer interfaces are great. So what interfaces do we have? Well, you know, it starts maybe 70 years ago,

• 13:26Speaker 01

  when they create screens, like they did for radar, and then for missile systems, they create a screen, like I'm looking at now, and you're looking at now. And so that's a way for us to connect to our machine. And then eventually, at Xerox PARC, and Alan Kay, and people like Doug Engelbart, they create the mouse, they create the graphical user interface, they create the desktop metaphor, the folders, the trashcans, the drag and drop. That makes an easier human-computer interface. And the great advances in the personal computer revolution came not just from processing power, but from advances in this human-computer interface, or connection.

• 14:11Speaker 01

  So what are the ultimate ones? Well, we just talked about Steve Jobs, in his last board meeting at Apple, looking at Siri. If I can talk to my machine, that's maybe an easier way to interface with it than pointing and clicking and typing. So it's an advance in the human-computer interface. But what's the ultimate advance? The ultimate advance is if you have a chip in your brain, and a chip in your computer, and they communicate instantly at the speed of light with each other. So every thought you have, the computer understands, and every answer the computer has goes right into your brain. That's a bit of a ways off, but Elon Musk is able to make the impossible

• 14:56Speaker 01

  seem like something that becomes, moves from science fiction to science. And so he's implanted Neuralink chips in the brain. And as usual, he has a great vision, which is, this will be the way we communicate with our computers. But then he figures out a business model to help pay the way to get to that vision. And that business model is that it's already helping people with paralysis to use their mind, people with Lou Gehrig's disease, people who have trouble, you know, using their hands to connect with their computer, or their voice.

• 15:40Speaker 01

  They can use the Neuralink chip to connect to their computer.

• 15:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, I saw a video of it, it was something, an advertisement, but it was rather remarkable. I do have a friend who says that when the chips go in, he's moving to Montana, meaning he's gone off the grid to return to humanity. Are you, what's your thought on just that general question of, you know, the digital world, especially the attention-draining aspect of our phones right now, sapping a lot of our human connections? Are you worried about that at all? Are the people you talk to worried about it?

• 16:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that the, the social media revolution ended up being something that was supposed to connect us all. But in the Builders podcast, we talk about how that went astray. First of all, the algorithms of social media, instead of uniting us, found a better business model with enraging us. So when you're talking about technology and going off the grid, I've weaned myself from social media. I've taken all my Facebook, and Instagram, and TikTok apps, and put them on the last screen of my phone, and I don't use it very much. The question is, are you afraid of AI?

• 17:00Speaker 01

  Well, no, I'm not afraid of AI. I think I use it all the time, it's enormously helpful. But I want an AI that responds to me and connects to me. So I'm somebody who doesn't actually give all my credit card information, my bank account information, and my passwords to an AI agent, so that it can make restaurant reservations for me. I can easily, just, you know, I feel more secure if I wanna go to Galatois Restaurant here in New Orleans, I just either go to the website, or go to Resy or OpenTable, and make a reservation. So, you know, I think we have to be careful about what we delegate to autonomous agents.

• 17:44Speaker 01

  And that's a discussion we have in this Builders podcast, is why do we want to take ourselves out of the loop? And what is the purpose of this technology? Peter Thiel, who's one of the people I interview in the Builders, famously said, you know, 20 years ago, that the technology we were inventing, they promised us flying cars, but what we got was 140 characters. Well, AI, and AGI, and superintelligence promises us all sorts of wonderful things, like protein folding that wins the Nobel Prize for Demis Hassabis, and maybe can help cure diseases.

• 18:25Speaker 01

  But somehow or another, some of the companies are marching down the path of doing sort of agents that do tasks for us that seem somewhat useful, but generally trivial, and a little bit something you have to be cautious about. I wish they were focusing their time, their effort, their GPUs, their processing power, and their IQ points on curing cancer, or figuring out new forms of energy efficiency, and ways to fight climate change, instead of making these Metamuses that act as agents.

• 19:08Speaker 01

  And I feel a lot of us are gonna say, all right, they're fun up to a point, but I'm not gonna let my life be ruled by agents out of my control.

• 19:18Speaker 00

  So you mentioned you use AI a lot in your daily activity. I do too. I don't use it to write, at all. But I do use it to talk, to talk to. And I suspect younger people are gonna joyously use it to write, they use it to read, just cut corners, save time, whatever, you can use your own metaphor. But I find, I find myself drawing close to Claude. Claude is a, I feel like he's my buddy. I don't let him see very much of my life. He doesn't see my passwords, I don't put my email in his, in his, in his files. But he's very jovial, and very happy to make me happy.

• 20:02Speaker 00

  And when I have a problem, sometimes at work, or a challenge, certainly in my home, I just, I ask Claude, and he's really, really good at those things. He's phenomenal. And even as good as, I'm the president of a liberal arts college here in Israel. He's pretty good at helping me think through strategic issues I worry about. And I can tell him to be tough on me, instead of just so friendly. And I wonder if I know, I'm talking less to my wife about some of those problems, which may be, at times, something she's grateful for. But I worry that, again, through this technology, we will isolate ourselves. Do you find that happening to yourself? Do you worry about that at all?

• 20:43Speaker 01

  No, I don't allow my technology to be isolating, and there are things I don't allow my technology to do. I spend a lot of time with Claude, OpenAI, even Grok and others, doing research, saying, you know, translate all of Marie Curie's scientific notebooks for me. But I draw a red line, which, I'm sorry, did you wanna say something else?

• 21:05Speaker 00

  No, no, just, it's incredible. Its ability to translate, it's, right now, it's teaching me Hebrew with incredible facility, better than any app, and it's totally included in the price.

• 21:18Speaker 01

  What I was gonna say, if you don't mind, I draw a red line at writing. Every sentence I write, whether it's an email, whether it's an op ed piece, or whether it's my new introduction to The Innovators, or my forthcoming book on Marie Curie, every sentence is typed by my fingers and comes from my head and from my heart. And why? Not necessarily because I think I'm a better writer than Claude, although I do think I

• 21:55Speaker 01

  am. But I know that my words are my words and not the words of some AI LLM. And I don't have a grand philosophical reason, but for me, if I'm not writing and composing and crafting the sentence, I'm not fully understanding exactly what I want to say. So I allow my students at Tulane to use AI even to do their projects. But I make them show exactly what the AI did and exactly what they did. And I say, when it comes to the final writing,

• 22:36Speaker 01

  if you don't craft those words in your mind, you are not fully understanding them and you're not really responsible for those words. So I draw the red line at, if it's a sentence that's being published by me, that sentence is written by my fingertips, typed on my keyboard, and comes from my head and my heart.

• 23:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm with you again, but we're a different generation than the young people who've had it from the beginning. I wonder if they'll feel that same connection. What do you think of the value of the liberal arts in the age of AI?

• 23:18Speaker 01

  I think that I enforce on my students at Tulane that if they want to be in my class on the history of the digital revolution, they should be double majors. And that means they should major in one of the hard sciences or math, and they should major in one of the humanities or social sciences. So they can do, you know, math and music as a major, or neuroscience and literature as a major. But I really think that if you see the patterns across nature, if you're able to connect the humanities to the technology, that's what will do you good. In my book, The Innovators, and even in the new introduction for the

• 24:02Speaker 01

  new edition of The Innovators, I talk about how Steve Jobs, whenever he did his product presentations in the Yorba Linda Center in San Francisco, he ended with a slide that said, the street signs, that was the intersection between the liberal arts and science, or the liberal arts and technology. Said, if you stand at that intersection, that's where creativity occurs. So I believe that somebody who knows coding and science, but doesn't understand the liberal arts, will not be as successful. As Steve Jobs said once of

• 24:44Speaker 01

  Bill Gates, you know, Steve Jobs, when Steve went to college, he took calligraphy and dance and music and poetry. And Bill Gates took applied math, and mainly math and science courses. He said, if Bill Gates had taken some more humanities courses, he might have understood how beauty matters.

• 25:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, Microsoft Outlook would probably be a little bit more pleasant to use, but I'll leave that for another time. After talking to all these tech giants, and they're very impressive people, many of them in their public stances are fearful. They're fearful of the future. They're not, you talk about, when you're talking about Steve Jobs, you mentioned that technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, it's that that yields us the result that makes our hearts sing. Now, these folks don't seem to be doing a lot of singing. Do you sense genuine fear about the world they're creating?

• 25:48Speaker 01

  I think that they do believe that there is a chance that it'll go totally awry. And in the Builders podcast, whether it's Elon Musk, or Dario Amade, or Mustafa Salaman, I ask the basic question, why are you building this technology? If they say, it creates enormous, I say, but does it help humans? Does it help humanity? And if there is what they call their P doom, their probability that it will doom us all, and that P doom is, some of them on the Builders podcast say, it's 10%. I go, wait a minute, if it's 10%, why are you playing at this game? And if it's 1%, if it's a non-trivial number, shouldn't

• 26:32Speaker 01

  we be pausing? I think all of them, in some ways, would like to pause. All of them think there should be some guardrails. But it's such a competitive environment, then Anthropic's not going to pause and put too many guardrails, because when it does, and when it tells the Pentagon, it's going to put these guardrails in pause, maybe OpenAI steps in and say, we're not going to pause. Or they say, we're in a race with China. So sometimes you get into a prisoner's dilemma, or some place where you know you should be more cautious, but the competitive race makes it difficult to do so.

• 27:11Speaker 00

  But you know, I don't know all the people on your podcast. I know a few of them. And in general, my experience of Silicon Valley, which I spent many summers at Stanford, it's an extraordinary place. There's so many brilliant people putting dents in the universe. But their knowledge just tends to be quite narrow. They didn't major in music and math. They didn't major in computer science and intellectual history. And so when you ask them, you know, what are you doing to make human life more, let's say, to allow humans to flourish? I suspect sometimes that's a language that doesn't speak to them. They weren't educated in that tradition.

• 27:54Speaker 01

  No, I don't think that's true. I think, you know, if you listen to Dario Amade and Daniela, I interviewed them together, his sister, you know, they understand philosophy and the arts, especially Daniela. They've hired Amanda Askel, not hired, but on their team is Amanda Askel, a great philosopher from Oxford and NYU, from Scotland. There's a team of philosophers working with them. I was just at the Anthropic office, and I saw, you know, Russ do that, the former, the CBS correspondent, who used to be a New York Times columnist. He said, yeah, we're gathering public policy thinkers. When I talked

• 28:35Speaker 01

  to Mustafa Salaman for the Builders podcast, I asked him, you know, we talked about what he majored in. Well, he majored in theology and philosophy. So these are the people who are going to flourish in this new world.

• 28:49Speaker 00

  I hope you're right. There's certainly some really broadly read people, and broadly educated. But in my experience, there's a lot of narrow ones, and they're on a mission, which I get. Some of it's competition, some of it is their own desire, understandably, to, as I say, to put a dent in the universe. Having talked to that group, it's a very impressive group of people, I was thinking about what adjectives might describe them. Cerebral, sure, driven, 100% competitive. Uh huh. What about humble versus arrogant? Is there, is there any diversity in the group there?

• 29:25Speaker 01

  I think that, you know, there's a wonderful story of Benjamin Franklin, when he had the 12 traits you were supposed to have to be a great innovator in the town of Philadelphia in the 1740s, he had a little club called the Leather Apron Club of young entrepreneurs. And the list of virtues, of virtues you kind of see in some of the builders I do in the podcast called The Builders, which is, you know, industry, and, you know, drive, and things like that. And one of the people in Benjamin Franklin's club, after he showed around his list, and he showed how he had mastered each one of them on

• 30:07Speaker 01

  a given week, said, Franklin, you've left off a virtue you may want to try. And Franklin says, what's that? And the friend says, humility, you might want to try that one. And Franklin laughs and puts it on his list. And he says, after a while in a letter to his sister, I was never very good at the virtue of humility. I never mastered, but I learned the pretense of humility. I learned to fake humility. I could fake it very well. And here's his genius. He said, I learned that the pretense of humility was just as useful as the reality of humility. One of the things missing in The Builders is a sense of humility. The

• 30:50Speaker 01

  question I ask in The Innovators, and I ask in the new introduction to this book, and this is a book about the entire creation of the digital revolution, starting with Ada Lovelace, but mainly with Alan Turing, the computers, Andy Grove, Gordon Moore, Bob Noes, creation of the microchip, all the way to Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg, I ask, you know, who has the humility? Very few do. And there's an open question. If you read that book, or if you listen to The Builders podcast, we all think that the virtue of humility is very good for us. But it may not be good for being a builder or a founder.

• 31:34Speaker 01

  Elon Musk totally lacks the virtue of humility. Steve Jobs was not great at the virtue of humility. You know, I sometimes have a lot of humility. I'll wake up in the morning and think of all the things I got wrong the day before. And I think, boy, you know, I'm not as good as these people are doing this stuff. But maybe with my humility, I'm never going to get a rocket, you know, up to the moon. I'm never going to have an EV or self-driving car. I'm never going to make the iPhone. So I don't recommend not having the virtue of humility. But it is something that been both the book, The Innovators, and in the

• 32:18Speaker 01

  series of podcasts that I'm dropping called The Builders, we talk about empathy and humility, two traits that we think make for a good person, meaning we, meaning me and my friends and probably you. But a lot of these people say, no, those are handicaps, not traits, if you have too much humility and too much empathy.

• 32:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's no doubt that overconfidence is a virtue if you want to be successful in the world of entrepreneurship or technology.

• 32:53Speaker 01

  But you gotta remember that a lot of people are overconfident and they end up crashing and burning.

• 32:59Speaker 00

  We only see that.

• 33:00Speaker 01

  And people sometimes come up to me after I talk about Steve Jobs and they say, I'm just like Steve Jobs. What do you mean? They say, oh, you know, I make people barrel through walls for me. I'm, when, you know, when people say something's not going to work, I have a reality distortion field and I say, you know, it's going to work because I say so. And I say, you know what? Have you ever invented the iPhone? Have you ever invented the Macintosh? Have you ever made the iPod? You're not Steve Jobs. You know, maybe you need a little humility because you're never going to be Steve Jobs. You're going to be somebody who with a lot of persistence, but also a little bit of humility

• 33:45Speaker 01

  will be able to make things work. Don't try to be Steve Jobs if you're not as talented as he is.

• 33:50Speaker 00

  And we also, of course, it's the selection bias. We only see the ones who succeed and the ones who fail, we never see them. I do think it makes you a better, it might make you a worse entrepreneur, humility, but it makes you a better friend probably and a spouse.

• 34:04Speaker 01

  You have to decide what you want to do in life. And, you know, I ran CNN for a while and both Elon Musk and Steve Jobs said, you were never very good at running CNN. And they said, you had too much empathy. You cared too much about whether Lou Dobbs or Greta Van Susskind liked you or something. And, and, and what Musk said to me is, and what you call empathy is actually a form of vanity. Because the reason you did that was not simply because you cared about other people, but you wanted them to like you. And you can't be a great builder if you wake up every morning and say, how can I get everybody to like me? And I said, okay, I get it.

• 34:47Speaker 01

  And then I said to myself, you know what? Maybe I'm not cut out to be somebody like an Elon Musk. Maybe I'm not going to get a rocket ship that'll get people back from the space station. But I'm going to live my life the way I feel is useful. And we should each live our own lives to our own values. I write biographies. My Builders podcast tells you what these builders think deep inside. The Innovators tells you about all the people who created the digital revolution, but they're not how-to books. They don't tell you, be just like Elon Musk. That's a bad lesson to take.

• 35:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, when they told you you were too nice and that you're only doing it to curry favor with your colleagues and employees, I wonder if that was just a rationalization for being a self-centered person, but there's some truth to it, obviously.

• 35:45Speaker 01

  Wired magazine did a cover story after the Steve Jobs book came out, which basically the cover line was, do you have to be an asshole?

• 35:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:55Speaker 01

  And I'll let every person decide that, but even if you think that being a jerk can help you in business, you then have to go to the next level and say, what do I want to be as a human?

• 36:05Speaker 00

  For sure. Let's, let's talk about biography. Not all your books are literally biographies, but many of them have biographical element or, or are biographies. Make that case for reading biographies. It's fun. People do it for fun. Is there other value to it in your mind and for, for writing those books for you?

• 36:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, if it's good enough for the Bible, it's good enough for us. The way we tell tales or convey morality is through the stories of people. We go to a garden east of Eden and we meet Adam and Eve and we learn about the tree of knowledge. Or we learn about Jesus and the parables of Jesus and it's, let me tell you a story about people. So we're a storytelling species, we humans, and we also are a species that tells stories through humans. When I was in college, biography fell out of favor in the academy. Universities didn't do it. I had a great professor who you know of, her name then was Doris Kearns, and she wrote,

• 37:12Speaker 01

  she, I took her course and she wrote her dissertation and published her book and it was a biography called Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream. And Harvard denied her tenure because they thought biography was simplification of history. And so for really almost a generation, university professors and people seeking tenure didn't tend to write biographies. That left the field open for people like David McCullough, Robert Caro, many people who were non-academics to write biographies. And then the next successor generation was John Meacham and Evan Thomas and Michael

• 37:57Speaker 01

  Beschloss and Ron Chernow and myself, perhaps, none of whom were traditional academics. But I do think that, as Henry Kissinger said in the beginning of my biography of him, he said, when I was a professor at Harvard, I used to think history was made by, you know, grand forces, but when I see it up close, I see what a difference a human, a person can make. And so that's the case for biography, is yes, history is made by grand forces, but there are people who touch the surface of history and make ripples in that surface and have an influence. And we tell the story of our time through the people who make it.

• 38:42Speaker 00

  That lists you just compiled of great biographers. They're not, some of them are not academics, but they're all Scottish.

• 38:51Speaker 01

  That's what I just said, none of them are academics.

• 38:53Speaker 00

  And none of them are, but all of them, almost all of them perhaps, are scholars and researchers and thinkers. So it's a kind of an artificial distinction, I would suggest.

• 39:04Speaker 01

  Well, they're also reporters, which is a little bit different from what's done in the academy. Which means when I go and did the book, The Innovators, and even when I did the new introduction to it, that's, you know, for the paperback that's come out this week, I go out there. I spend time in the Johnny Ive's design studio at Apple. I walk around the Intel building. I talked to Andy Grove. I got a Airstream trailer and parked it near, next to Elon Musk's house down in Starbase, Texas. Why? Because I'm doing something AI can't do and I'm doing something that academics generally

• 39:47Speaker 01

  don't do, which is I'm standing there watching, listening and taking notes. And so that's what a reporter, like a Robert Caro, like a John Meacham, that's what they bring to the party, as well as being scholars. And if you're just doing reporting and you're not doing scholarly research, yeah, then you just do a journalistic book and it's fine, but not great. And likewise, if you're just diving into the archives and doing scholarly work, but you never ask anybody any questions and say, tell me the story, you're missing part of it. And so I think what you get with these biographers like a John Meacham and even a Doris Kearns

• 40:30Speaker 01

  good one, is people go out and report as well as do research.

• 40:36Speaker 00

  So you've written biographies of Kissinger, you mentioned Benjamin Franklin, Einstein, Steve Jobs, Da Vinci, Elon Musk. You have a new book evidently coming soon on Marie Curie. You wrote a book on Dудна, the discovery of CRISPR. Many of them are in the sciences, but not all of them. Kissinger's not a scientist. What attracted you to these people and what was your strategy when you were crafting?

• 41:03Speaker 01

  When I did Henry Kissinger, I ended with the notion of realism in foreign policy. And I wanted to go back and say, who were the great realists? And there aren't many in American foreign policy. Most are idealists like Woodrow Wilson. But Benjamin Franklin was a great realist in his conduct as a diplomat, a balance of power between the Bourbon Pact nations and England and France, understanding America's interests. And I realized when I was writing it, it was partly came from his science. It partly came from the fact that he had a fluid theory of electricity that had checks and balances and plus minuses. And we sometimes think of him as a doddering dude flying a kite in the rain, but those

• 41:48Speaker 01

  science experiments were the most important science of the time. And so I realized that being alienated from science, which happened to some people in my generation, was a bad thing. And part of that was Einstein. He made it, you know, if you were Franklin and Jefferson, you could believe anybody should be able to understand Newton. It's not that hard. It's forces, acceleration, mass. But Einstein made it seem uncertainties and relativities. So I wanted to demystify Einstein. And once I did that, I realized that even though the biographers we've talked about, whether it's Ron Chernow or John Meacham, they do, you know, powerful people.

• 42:33Speaker 01

  They do presidents. To me, scientists and technologists and people who connect science and technology to business have actually more of an impact on our lives than maybe even some of the presidents do. And so that's the row in the field of biography I decided I wanted to hoe.

• 42:55Speaker 00

  But when you're writing about someone like Benjamin Franklin or Einstein, where there's so many biographies already written about them, did you have a plan in the beginning of what you would do that was going to be distinctive, other than the fact that you write very well, which is always can sell, but did you have an overarching?

• 43:11Speaker 01

  Well, what I do on those biographies is that most of the biographies written about Franklin or about Einstein and others, don't go back to the original sources and don't have access to them the way we can today. There's, you know, hundreds of boxes of Benjamin Franklin's papers at the Sterling Library in Yale. And I went through them and saw what he did each day, but also I could get electronic or make electronic versions of them, which gave me a chance to fully understand. Likewise, Leonardo's notebooks, we have 7,000 pages of his notebooks. Einstein, we have, I think Princeton University Press

• 43:55Speaker 01

  has done 40, 50 volumes of his papers. I'm just finishing Marie Curie. We have, you know, 40 amazing lab notebooks and then hundreds of other boxes of papers. So what I try to do is go back to the original writing and see how their minds work and do a narrative based on that.

• 44:16Speaker 00

  You spend a lot of time studying or speaking directly when they're alive to a lot of very smart people. Has it changed you? Do you feel, I'm sure it has, but I'm curious if you feel that change and what you've sensed that it is?

• 44:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I look at some of the traits they have, one of which say is curiosity. You know, Franklin wanted to know everything you could possibly know about every subject knowable, from math to music, as I said. True of Leonardo, from art to anatomy, Leonardo wanted to know everything. So I've learned two things. One is to be curious. I'm here in New Orleans. You can look out of my window and it's a actually deep blue sky. When I look at Leonardo's notebook, I saw in the margin once, why is the sky blue? And then pages of experiments where he's spraying water through light and salt water and water with alcohol. I look at Einstein's notebook, there's the same question, why is the sky

• 45:14Speaker 01

  blue? And he's Lord Raely's formula, he's discovering all sorts of things. They are curious about things you and I see each day, but we don't pause and notice. So my rule in life is 12 times a day, I stop and look at something carefully and then get very curious about the most mundane things, like why does light glint off of a shiny leaf in the way it does? Or why is the sky blue? Why is the water on the Mississippi River rippling in a different way than the wind is blowing? That curiosity drives me each day and it wants me to try to learn everything about all sorts of fields. I want to learn

• 45:55Speaker 01

  chemistry and physics to do Marie Curie and Einstein. I want to know exactly the difference, how, how on off switches in a circuit can make you do logical sequences. So I can actually understand how an LLM works. And so like Marie Curie, I try to keep a hunger for knowing things.

• 46:19Speaker 00

  Well, I'm a big fan of curiosity. I'm curious, you said 12 times. Is that a hard rule? Or is that an expression?

• 46:27Speaker 01

  Not a hard rule.

• 46:28Speaker 00

  That was an expression. Okay.

• 46:29Speaker 01

  I'll get near the end of the day and I'll say, you know what, let me pause and do some more curiosity things. And I'll look at a bird like I can look at out of the window that was sitting on my balcony. And I can wonder, does its wings go up faster or down faster when it takes off? Something Leonardo had in his notebook. And there are lizards on the balcony behind me and some are really green and some are brown. It's like, how do they change colors? So these are things I try to push myself to say, all right. And the good thing is with AI, I can get an answer pretty quickly.

• 47:06Speaker 00

  And if you don't understand it, you can ask again. It never gets annoyed, frustrated, very patient.

• 47:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:12Speaker 00

  You mentioned Robert Caro. As far as I know, he spent about the last 50 years or so on one man, Lyndon Baines Johnson, four volumes so far, over 3,000 pages, over a million words. Joseph Frank wrote a five volume biography of Dostoevsky. It's about a million words. You've taken a different approach. Do you understand, can you relate to those kinds of obsessions focusing on one person for decades?

• 47:41Speaker 01

  Well, I think you're one of the first people to say I'm different because I write shorter biographies because mine are like 500 pages and we like long biographies. But I think people like storytelling. Yeah, we each have different approaches. Some people just write Substack columns and some people write, make podcasts and some people write very long biographies and some people write five volume biographies. I'm not absolutely convinced that a five volume biography serves quite as much of a purpose as doing some distillation. There's a famous letter that Blaise Pascal, the philosopher, wrote to his

• 48:26Speaker 01

  son and he said, I'm sorry for writing such a long letter. I didn't have time to write a short one. And so I think there's some usefulness. When I was at Time Magazine, we learned everything had to fit on, you know, pages of a magazine. So you'd write and then there was a process called greening, where you'd take a green pencil and you'd cross out things that weren't necessary. And so I believe editing and compression are important, but I also believe that letting a story flow and giving the narrative is important. And my sweet spot tends to be biographies that are one volume, that aren't too long, but they tell you a story.

• 49:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, I will let listeners know that Joseph Frank did produce a one volume version of his five volume masterpiece for those. And it's funny, I find it, I'm uneasy reading and abridged anything, even when it's abridged by the author, it makes me a little bit uncomfortable. Could you give us a favorite story of Marie Curie?

• 49:30Speaker 01

  There's a moment in November of 1911 and Marie Curie is in Brussels for the first great conference of physicists there. She's already won the Nobel Prize with her husband Pierre for discovering radioactivity. And he's died. Pierre Curie has gotten killed partly because of radiation poisoning. And she's in mourning for four years, but by the time of November 1911, she gets to Brussels and she's with Albert Einstein, her friend, and one of Einstein's favorite students and collaborators, Paul L'Enjevan. And Marie

• 50:12Speaker 01

  Curie is having a secret and passionate love affair with Paul L'Enjevan. And Paul L'Enjevan's wife, while they're there, discovers their love letters and threatens to expose them. Marie Curie lends Paul L'Enjevan money to try to pay off his wife to stay silent. And Mrs. L'Enjevan doesn't, their letters explode in the tabloids. But just at that moment, she gets a telegram from Stockholm, that same week, that says, you've won your second Nobel Prize, this time in chemistry for discovering radium and polonium. And then

• 50:55Speaker 01

  the scandal becomes huge. It's all over the French tabloids. And so the Nobel committee leaders say, it would be best given the scandal if you do not come to Stockholm and accept the prize. And she flings it back at them. She said, if I were a man having an affair, you would never have suggested that. And indeed Einstein was having an affair, L'Enjevan, of course, and she says, I'm offended by what you've asked. And she goes to Stockholm and she accepts her prize. And in her speech, she says, my personal life is in no way connected

• 51:38Speaker 01

  to my scientific and professional life. And that is the one thing she was wrong about. Her personality and her personal life were very connected to her professional life and her science. They were both driven by passion. They were both driven by a stubbornness and they were both driven by a willingness to flout conventions and not to be constrained for being a woman. And so that's the story of a lot of the builders I talked about in the Builders podcast and a lot of the people in my book, The Innovators, that we've just

• 52:18Speaker 01

  come out with a new issue. Is there stubborn? They're passionate and they're willing to defy convention. Anyway, Russ, thank you so much for having me.

• 52:28Speaker 00

  My guest today has been Walter Isaacson. Walter, thanks for being part of Econ Talk.

• 52:33Speaker 01

  Great. My real pleasure. Thank you.

• 52:35Speaker 00

  This is Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. For more Econ Talk, go to EconTalk.org, where you can also comment on today's podcast and find links and readings related to today's conversation. The sound engineer for Econ Talk is Rich Goyette. I'm your host, Russ Roberts. Thanks for listening. Talk to you on Monday.