Walter Isaacson (2014)

The Ben Franklin of today is Elon Musk.
The best bar in New Orleans is a tie: Snug Harbor and the Napoleon House. It depends on your mood and who's playing at Snug Harbor.

Yes. I was not very good at running CNN. I did not understand, nor have much passion for, television as a medium. So I didn't have a feel for what would work. I liked hiring great folks like Aaron Brown and Anderson Cooper and trying to do smarter TV, but I just don't think I was cut out for TV.

I tried very hard to get Steve to talk about software design -- especially the Darwin kernel in the NeXT OS and how it evolved into the Apple OS when he came back. But I could never, no matter how hard I tried, get him interested in reflecting on the details of software design.

The theme of my book is that human minds and computers bring different strengths to the party. The pursuit of strong Artificial Intelligence has been a bit of a mirage -- starting in the 1950s, it's always seen to be 20 years away. But the combination of humans and machines in more intimate partnership -- what JCR Licklider called symbiosis and what Peter Thiel calls complementarity -- has proven more fruitful. Indeed amazing. So I suspect that for the indefinite future, the combination of human minds and machine power will be more powerful than aiming for artificial intelligence and a singularity.

I have seen a screening of "The Imitation Game." It is great, as is Benedict Cumberbatch. Turing is a major character in my book, and I hope the movie will cause more people to appreciate him (and maybe read the chapters in my book about him!)

This is a great question. As you will see in my book, I believe we needed BOTH the engineering advances AND the theoretical ones: how Boolean algebra could be done in a digital circuit, Turing's concept of a Universal Computing Machine, von Neumann's improvements on stored program architecture. I believe innovation is always a combination of theory and engineering. For the transistor, you needed John Bardeen who knew how the theory of quantum physics applied to the surface states of semiconductors as well as Walter Brattain who knew how to jam a paper clip in some silicon or germanium to make it work.

AGREE. I used to go to the Half Moon back when Mike Roccaforte still owned it. And I grew up on Napoleon Ave near Tipitina's. I still go to sleep dreaming of Professor Longhair there.

I may do Leonardo da Vinci or Louis Armstrong. But Kerry deserves kudos. He's working very hard in a complex world. I wish him luck with the Middle East.

I see no need to write my own autobiography or memoir. I have been very lucky and even successful. Yet I know I have mainly been an observer, not a person in the arena. My life is not nearly as interesting as the business people, innovators, geniuses, etc. whom I write about.

I think it's wacky and outdated that we teach school math as a process leading up to calculus. That's a relic of the Sputnik era, when were were all going to calculate rocket trajectories. Instead, starting in fourth grade, I think we should be teaching mathematical logic, proofs, and algorithms. We should also emphasize statistics and probabilities. Every kid should be able to do Boolean algebra and formal logic, rather than getting mired in just traditional algebra. We should also teach programming languages, especially C++, but we need to make sure that kids are also comfortable with the theory and concepts of algorithms, which underpins all programming language. Also, like Ada Lovelace, we should learn that math is a beautiful thing to be visualized, and not just formulas to be memorized. When we see an equation or algorithm or logical sequence, we should visualize it just as we do a line of her dad's poetry, such as "she walks in beauty like the night."

Both! But mainly because it's a time suck.

I think there are many better biographers than I am. Doris Kearns Goodwin, Robert Caro, and David McCullough all of course come to mind. What I try to do is reporting; I am very lucky that because of my days at Time and CNN I have the opportunity to just call people up -- Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Larry Page -- and get the chance to go see them and sit down with them. I try to be a storyteller, rather than over-analyze things. I let the reader do most of the assessment -- like on the behavior of Jobs or Gates or others. I try to tell the story and get out of the way so the reader can feel upclose to the subject.

Vaclav Havel, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Madeleine Albright. Soory, that's four.

It would be interesting if we built computers not based on digital circuits using binary logic -- and instead tried to replicate the human mind in a carbon-based and wetware chemical system, perhaps even an analog one, like nature did it!

The most amazing thing I always discover is that they are human. That means they have flaws. That also means they are more inspiring than if they were made of marble and kept on a pedestal.

I never work on commission. I once began work on a biography of Louis Armstrong. I wanted to show how creativity comes from diversity. Through my research I got to know everything about Armstrong -- except who he was. I knew what he did almost every day -- but not whether he was happy, or why he smiled, or why he ragged that opening cadenza to West End Blues the way he did. Maybe someday I will get back to it. Maybe someday I will do it as a multimedia book in collaboration with Wynton Marsalis.

Yes, I hope we apply innovation to health and transportation the way we have done to networking and information technology. But it's much harder. It takes a bigger investment, is less easy to do in a garage, and there are more regulations.

I have done living people before: Kissinger, the Wise Men. With a living subject, you get to know (if you take time to do a lot of personal interviews and listen) a hundred times more than you can learn about a historic person. I know much more about the chamfers of the original mac than about all of Ben Franklin's lightning rod and kite-flying experiments. I tend to be a bit soft when writing about someone alive, because I tend to like most people I get to know.

I think our public policy today HINDERS innovation. The media and our gotcha style of political discourse makes it so that everyone tries to cover their ass and is scared of doing anything that might have a risk. So a lot of things get blocked, a lot of regulations are issued, and the government no longer helps fund (as it did during the Eisenhower years) the basic research that leads to future inventions like the Internet and microchip and laser.

Favorite book: The Innovators.
Favorite job: reporter for Time, especially in Eastern Europe.
Next adventure: to be determined!

I am flattered that you remembered meeting me in Morocco. The Aspen Institute plans to do more int he MENA region. I went to Marrakesh to write my graduate dissertation, and I still love Morocco.

1. Being rebellious and having the courage to think different.
2. Boiled crawfish with a lot of Zatarin's.

I am totally in awe of the genius of Aaron Sorkin, and my ego is not so big that I thought he needed any help from me! He's a genius, especially at dialogue and intellectual character studies.

I still think the US is the best, because we are most comfortable with the free and unfettered flow of ideas. That's critical for the information age. But so, too, is good education. We could do well to learn from Finland on that score, or South Korea. I liked Amanda Ripley's book on that, The Smartest Kids in the World.

I was at the Gdansk shipyards with Walesa in 1989 and with Havel when he was released from prison in Prague. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.
Prague and Budapest are among my favorite cities.

I actually finished the book in August a couple of months before he died. He and I decided it should end with him stepping down as CEO of Apple. It was already printed when he died. I thought and hoped -- and he thought and hoped -- that he was going to be alive when it was published. I still wish that had been the case.

Four paragraphs a night. And don't watch TV.

Twenty years ago was a GREAT time to go into journalism. Ben Bradlee's funeral yesterday reminded me why. Five years ago was a HORRIBLE time. Now is a good time. Journalism is better than ever, there are more ways to do it, and there is less power given to gatekeepers -- and most importantly we are figuring out business models that rely on some user revenue and maybe small bitcoin-enabled payments rather than having to subsist just on ad revenue.

Leonardo da Vinci

The quality I most admired in Steve was his passion. The quality that I found the ost surprising, and made him seem the most real, was his emotion. He cried at times.

This history of the digital revolution is a passion project. I've been gathering string for years. It was mainly going to be about the Internet. But putting it aside to do Steve Jobs (and getting to know Bill Gates) made me decide to instead combine the history of the Internet and the personal computer. That's what made the powerful combination that ignited a revolution. They made me realize I should do all aspects of the digital revolution.

Be brutally honest even if it's painful. He encouraged me to put in stories that were critical of him.

They are all rebellious. They question received wisdom, are curious, think out of the box. As Steve would say, they think different. When Einstein read Newton in the Principia say that time marches along irrespective of how we observe it, he asked: How do we know that, how would we test that.

Q. Am I willing to fail?
A. Of course. I already have at times, and I have survived it!

The most important thing necessary for keeping the US as an innovative place is to make the current digital revolution more inclusive. Women and people from less privileged backgrounds need to be made part of it. And we have to make sure we have great educational opportunities for all, no matter what zip code they were born in.

I got to interview Elon Musk at the Vanity Fair / Aspen Institute New Establishment summit two weeks ago. It's on YouTube. He is amazing. But it's far too early to be writing his biography. He still has much to accomplish, and must keep taking his vision and executing on it.

I do not think that he believed crying was a sign of weakness.

I think the next huge wave of innovation will come in the field of biotech. The combinations of data, genetic engineering, biotechnology, and medicine will be hugely exciting.

All of my on-the-record interviews with Steve are in the book.

My favorite failures were the original systems to do digital payments and ways to disrupt the kludginess of the traditional banking system. Steve Crocker tried one. I think in the age of bitcoin, the opportunity has come roaring back to have digital micropayment systems.

Harvard and Stanford and Penn -- among others -- are now making it very easy to be both an entrepreneur and an academic at the same time. This is a great change in higher education -- for the good. GO FOR BOTH!

Leonardo

It was very emotional (and sometimes unnerving) to be on walks or sitting around for hours with Steve. But also hugely inspiring.
And, thanks for the kind words.