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Nov. 28, 2025 15:25-16:26 - CSPAN

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America's Book Club Walter Isaacson

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david rubenstein

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walter isaacson

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unidentified		Finding common ground matters most in Washington.
		Host Dasha Burns sits down with Cornell West, Union Theological Seminary professor, and Robert George, Princeton University professor, for a civil dialogue on rising political polarization in the U.S. and top issues facing the country.
		Bridging the Divide in American Politics.
		Watch Ceasefire today at 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. Eastern and Pacific, only on C-SPAN.
		President Trump has posted from Mar-a-Lago, where he's spending the Thanksgiving holiday.
		He writes, Any document signed by Sleepy Joe Biden with the AutoPen, which was approximately 92% of them, is hereby terminated and of no further force or effect.
		The Autopen is not allowed to be used if approval is not specifically given by the President of the United States.
		The radical left lunatics circling Biden around the beautiful resolute desk in the Oval Office took the presidency away from him.
		I am hereby canceling all executive orders and anything else that was not directly signed by crooked Joe Biden because the people who operated the AutoPen did so illegally.
		Joe Biden was not involved in the AutoPen process, and if he says he was, he will be brought up on charges of perjury.
		Thank you for your attention to this matter.
		America's Book Club is brought to you by these television companies and is supported by the Ford Foundation.
		From the nation's iconic libraries and institutions, America's Book Club takes you on a powerful journey of ideas, exploring the lives and inspiration of writers who have defined the country in conversation with civic leader and author David Rubinstein.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		As a young boy growing up in Baltimore, I went to my local library and was inspired to read as many books as I could.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Hopefully people will enjoy hearing from these authors and hopefully they'll want to read more.
unidentified		Now from the National Archives in Washington, D.C., former CEO of CNN and editor of Time Magazine, best-selling biographer of Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin, and Elon Musk, Walter Isaacson.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Well, let me welcome everyone here.
		I want to thank the National Archives for letting us use the National Archives perception room.
		And I want to thank Walter Isaacson for being here.
		Walter has a storied career.
		After graduating from Harvard, he was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford.
		After that, he went to Time Magazine after a few other journalistic detours and ultimately became the managing director of Time Magazine.
		From there, he later went to CNN where he became the president of CNN.
		And from there, he went to the Aspen Institute, where he was the president of the Aspen Institute.
		And while he was doing all that, he was writing books.
		So not just having a job, but in his spare hours, he was writing incredible books that became bestsellers.
		We're going to go through them today and talk about his life as an author and also as a person who's a historian.
		So Walter, thank you very much for doing this.
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		David, it's great to be back with you.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		So let's talk about your books on geniuses.
		You've written a number of books.
		People would say these are geniuses.
		Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, most recently, Elon Musk, Benjamin Franklin, Leonardo da Vinci, among others.
		We'll go through each of these.
		But what attracted you to these people?
		Was it because they were geniuses or you just happened to like them?
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		Well, you know, in our professions, we meet a lot of smart people.
		And at some point, you realize smart people are a dime a dozen.
		In order to be a genius, you have to be creative.
		You have to think out of the box.
		And one of the things that struck me when I wrote about Benjamin Franklin early on was what a great scientist and technologist he was.
		We think of him as a doddering dude flying a kite in the rain.
		But those were the most important scientific experiments of the time.
		So I decided to do as sort of the row I would plow in the field of biography, those who connect the arts and the sciences, the humanities and technology.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Okay, so let's talk about Benjamin Franklin.
		Obviously he's famous for many things.
		He's on the $100 bill, famous for having been involved in both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, among other things.
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		All five founding documents, including one we just saw, the Treaty of Paris.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		What was so talented about him?
		He didn't go to college.
		He didn't go to high school.
		He basically was self-taught, right?
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, exactly.
		Very much self-taught because he was lucky to be apprenticed to his older brother who was a printer and bookseller.
		So he'd take the books down every night.
		But when you look at really great people, sometimes it's a team.
		And you needed smart people for the founding of our nation.
		And you had Jefferson and Madison and so you needed passionate people like Samuel Adams and his cousin John and people of great rectitude like Washington.
		But the real key is can you find the common ground?
		Can you bring people together?
		And Franklin had a wisdom that's not always there with intelligence.
		Wisdom is more important.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		So when you started researching him, you found he had some flaws, not a perfect person, unlike everybody else.
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		A lot of the people I write about have flaws.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		I remember in your book, you pointed out that he lived in England for a long time.
		At one point, he got a letter from a friend saying, your wife, his common law wife living in Philadelphia, is dying.
		You ought to come back and be with her.
		He hadn't been with her in 10 years.
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		You know, he was definitely not winning the award for the best family man ever.
		He has Deborah, his common-law wife.
		She had been married before, and her husband had disappeared.
		So they had to have a common law relationship.
		Franklin even has a son, a son born out of wedlock, right before they got married, but he takes the son in.
		And so not only is his relationship with Deborah sort of functional, she didn't like to travel, he traveled all the time, but William became a loyalist to the Crown and broke with his father, Benjamin Franklin.
		So that conflict in the family is part of the interesting tale.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Now he was at the Second Continental Congress, which drafted the Declaration of Independence.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Did he draft it or did Jefferson draft it?
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		Well, Jefferson gets to be chair of the committee, as you know, which includes John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and two other representatives.
		Adams takes credit for making Jefferson have the right to write the first draft.
		Although I think even if they didn't want Adams to do it, Jefferson was the youngest but the best writer.
		But what happens is Jefferson finishes a draft on June 21st, I think, 1776, and sends it down Market Street one block to Ben Franklin and says, would the good Dr. Franklin make any improvements he wants?
		So you can watch five different drafts of the Declaration, which for those of us who are editors is kind of inspiring.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		So when you wrote that book, how long did it take you to write that book?
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		It took about three or four years, but I had been thinking about Franklin and especially his science.
		My father was an engineer.
		I loved the idea of the invention of batteries and electricity and currents.
		And so I'd always studied his science.
		And then I said, after I'd done Henry Kissinger, I wanted to figure out balance of power diplomacy, which was Franklin's expertise, but how that connected to Newtonian checks and balances.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Now Franklin, did he discover electricity or what did he really do?
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		What he did was discover that lightning was electricity, which was quite important because lightning was the biggest scourge of the time.
		He also discovered that electricity was a flow.
		People thought, you know, static electricity, they couldn't quite figure it out.
		But he realized he coins the terms plus and minus, negative and positive, battery, and he realizes it's called the single fluid theory of electricity, which other than Newton's theories is probably the most important theory of that century.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Now, a lot of people who are great geniuses and accomplish a lot in life have complicated personal lives.
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		Good.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		So you've already mentioned Franklin had a complicated personal life, but his grant, his son, did he not, was he not in favor of imprisoning his son because his son was a loyalist?
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, his son remains a loyalist, but had become royal governor of New Jersey, which was a crown appointment before the Revolution.
		And if you read Franklin's autobiography, which he wrote in the middle of life, it begins with the phrase, dear son.
		Now, it's not really written for his son, but it's to remind his son of his humble roots and not to become part of the royalty and aristocracy.
		So when George Washington is taking over, he realizes when he gets to New Jersey, is he going to have to arrest Benjamin Franklin's son?
		And Benjamin Franklin says, go for it.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Now, today, everybody writes an autobiography, it seems.
		There's nobody who doesn't have an autobiography, right?
		But his autobiography was very novel at the time because people didn't write autobiographies at the time.
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		And there was not really a just personal chatting.
		You know, Rousseau, others had done their pensés like Pascal, but they were basically meditations.
		Franklin writes in the pure vernacular, just chatting away at the reader.
		So he's almost inventing not just autobiography, but that folksy, homespun way of writing that you see all the way through Will Rogers and to the present.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		In the colonial days, people, leaders seemed to like to wear wigs to cover up, in part, the fact that they were bald.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		How come he didn't have a wig and why was he willing to show his bald head with his long hair?
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		When he becomes ambassador to Paris, he's there sent by the colonies and try to get them in our side on the revolution.
		He knows that the French have read Rousseau, perhaps once too often.
		So they believe in the natural man from the forests and how that's a source of morality.
		Benjamin Franklin had never been to a forest, hardly.
		He grew up on, you know, in Boston, Philadelphia, and London.
		But he wears a coonskin cap or a beaver cap, a fur cap, and the women of Paris used to touch it and all.
		And it became his way of showing he was a homespun American.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Let's talk about somebody you wrote about.
		You just mentioned, Henry Kissinger.
		Now, when you were writing about Kissinger, you're writing a book about somebody that Kissinger would say he was a genius, but he was alive.
		Franklin was not alive.
		Is it easier to write a book about somebody who's alive or somebody who's not alive?
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		Well, after I finished doing Henry Kissinger and had to deal with the blowback and the fallout and him explaining to me how I was wrong about how great he was, I said, I'm going to do somebody who's been dead for 250 years.
		And so I walked back to Franklin.
		And then after doing Steve Jobs, it was somewhat similar.
		I mean, he was a tough character to deal with.
		I said, I'm going to do somebody who's been dead 500 years.
		So I did Leonardo.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		What was Kissinger's genius, if you could summarize it?
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		Kissinger's genius was he had a fingertip feel, the Germans would call it fingers and gefuel, of how something somewhere would affect something else, how everything is interrelated in foreign affairs.
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		So as he's playing off the North Vietnamese with the Russians, their patron, the Chinese, he could do that real politique that he learned from Bismarck and Metternich.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Now, Kissinger wasn't happy with your book.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		He liked the title of it.
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, right.
		When somebody said, did you like Walter's book?
		He says, well, I like the title.
		He was Kissinger.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		But did he eventually forgive you for writing a book that he didn't like?
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		I was then the editor of Time, and we decided to invite back for our 75th anniversary everybody but on the cover of Time.
		And Gorbachev was coming, and Sophia Loran was coming, and Bill Clinton, and everybody else.
		And I was wondering whether Henry Kissinger would come.
		And then my phone rang in my office, because he had been mad at me.
		And he says, Ver Walter, even the 30 Years' War had to end at some point.
		I will come to your party.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		What about his wife?
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		He then paused and said, you know, Nancy, my wife, she's very partial to the Hundred Years' War.
		We will have to work on her.
		But then they came, and I seated them next to Joe DiMaggio, and they were thrilled.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		So you mentioned Steve Jobs.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		How did you get the idea from writing a book about Steve Jobs?
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		I had just finished Einstein.
		I did Ben Franklin, Einstein, and I was at a book event in California, and there's Steve Jobs.
		He said, let's take a walk.
		And we take a walk.
		And he says, do me next.
		And my first reaction was, yeah, you arrogant, you know, Franklin, Einstein, you.
		But then I realized, first of all, that he had been diagnosed with cancer and that he had affected our lives more than anybody else.
		Everything from the cell phone we have in our pocket to the fact we can plug in a computer and play with it to retail stores to digital animation, everything, a thousand songs in our pocket, that he had affected our lives the most.
		And he was somebody who connected technology to the humanities, so he was perfect.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		So when you wrote about Kissinger, I assume it wasn't a lot of interviews.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		You certainly weren't trailing him in all his meetings.
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		Actually, Dr. Kissinger gave me about 30 interviews.
		In fact, he used to do it at breakfast at 6 a.m., which is not my favorite day part.
		And every now and then he'd come and say, Ver Walter, you still do not understand why we had to bomb Cambodia.
		Let's have another breakfast session.
		So I had enough interviews.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Okay, well, Franklin obviously had passed away, so he went through documents and so forth.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		With Steve Jobs, did he give you even more access than Henry Kissinger did?
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		Totally.
		I made an arrangement with Steve Jobs, which is, I don't want to do it based on interviews.
		I want to do it based on being by your side, walking through your design studio with Johnny I, being at meetings, being at your house in Palo Alto, just watching you.
		And he said, fine.
		And then I said, but I want you to have no control over the book.
		He said, fine, I won't even read it in advance.
		He said, that way it'll seem more real.
		It won't seem like it was a fake book.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		So when you wrote the book, you realized he was ill, and you were writing the book, and he passed away just shortly before the book came out.
		So did you then feel that you had something that was so unique because you were the last person who really had access to him?
		And how did the book do?
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		Well, the important thing about the book was I just let the story tell itself.
		I realized I had such good material.
		Every meeting, everything about him, everything from Steve Wozniak to John Scully, who he got rid of, all these people.
		And so I didn't try to preach or pontificate.
		I said, just let me tell you a story.
		And the book did well, not because of the book, but he was just, you know, almost canonized from here to China, and everybody wanted to read about his magic.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		So when you're a book writer, let's say a history book writer or writer of biographies, typically you do lots of research.
		You could do three, four, five years, and then people start writing.
		That's what they do.
		Some of them do that way.
		Like Ron Chernow would say he spends four or five years researching, then he writes.
		In your case, you're a journalist by background, and so when you get information, do you go back after a week or two and write it up, and then you write your book in kind of a serial way, or do you wait till all the research is done and then you start writing?
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		I start writing and putting it together as I'm doing the research, especially with a living person.
		You asked about whether it's better to do a living person or a dead person.
		In some ways, my strength is as a reporter.
		They're greater historians like David McCullough, who know how to come to buildings like this for archives.
		But I'm good at getting people to talk.
		And so when I do it that way, what I do is do a first draft, just like the first draft of the Declaration, and a second draft.
		And finally, when I did Leonardo, I learned it was his trick as well.
		You almost do an underdrawing, then you do a sketch, and then line, you keep putting lines and paintbrush strokes on it.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		So the books we've talked about were people who were mostly people who were, let's say, born in the United States, or not Kishner wasn't born here, but spent most of his life here.
		When you wrote about Einstein, he spent a large part of his life in Germany and in Europe.
		Did you have to learn German to be able to understand everything he had done earlier in his life?
		Or how did you do that?
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		No, although I did have a German translator, just as when I did Leonardo, I had somebody who not only knew Italian but knew the Umbrian dialect of the 1500s, which is what Leonardo did.
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		I'm doing Marie Curie now and joyfully knew French as a child and I'm learning French again.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		So Einstein, it is often said that as a young boy, he was not all that smart and they used to call him dummy or something like that.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Is that true?
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		Your déperte, the dopey one in the family, because he was slow in learning how to talk as a child.
		He had what is called echolalia.
		He would repeat himself as he tried to talk.
		And so they all thought they even hired a tutor, they sent him to a doctor.
		But Einstein said that that really helped him because he thought in pictures.
		He visualized things, like he'd see Maxwell's equations and he'd visualize a light wave.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		And what's the story with the hair with Einstein?
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		I mean, why couldn't he just get a comb?
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		I think he felt that it was a waste of time.
		But what's particularly interesting to me, and I play with it in the book, is suppose he didn't have that wild halo of hair.
		If he didn't look like the genius, say he looked like Niels Bohr or something, would he have been as famous?
		And my answer is yes, even without the wild halo of hair.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		So it is said that his three pursuits that he really enjoyed the most were sailing, playing the violin, Mozart on the violin, and maybe meeting women.
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		Well, he liked physics too.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		Okay, physics.
		But I'm talking about other pursuits.
		So as a sailor, he had to get the Coast Guard to call him?
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		All the time.
		I mean, he had a little place near Berlin on a lake, and that was problematic.
		Eventually, the Nazis came in and raided it, which is why he came over.
		So he's at the end of Long Island, and he'd be dreaming in these little dinghies, just one person, and they'd have to send the Coast Guard out for him.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Was he a good violinist?
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		He was actually pretty good.
		I think that what was important was he would say, even when I was doing general relativity, the most elegant theory in all of science, whenever he was stumped, you know, sometimes we have writers blocked.
		I think he had equation blocked.
		He'd say, I'd pull out my violin and play Mozart, which would connect me to the harmony of the spheres.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		He had a complicated personal life.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		His first wife was, was it his cousin?
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		No, no, no.
		His first wife was somebody in the Zurich Polytech with him, who was the only woman, Mileva Maravich, who was a physics student at Polytech, and helped him in some ways in the 1905 papers by typing them up, helping with the math.
		And some people say she doesn't get enough credit, although in my book I explore exactly what she can do.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Interestingly, they had a relationship before they got married, and they had a child.
		And because it was considered in German Jewish circles not to be very good to have children out of wedlock, they gave the child up for adoption.
		Later, when they got married, they never went back to find the child.
		Is that right?
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it's one of life's mysteries, and we have many mysteries in my biography, like who is the mother of Benjamin Franklin's son, William.
		I play with that in the book.
		But also, what happened to Albert Einstein and Maleva's first child, who seems to have been put up for adoption and probably died young in one of the plagues.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		But later, when they wanted to get divorced, Einstein said, I guess, according to your book, look, I really would like to get divorced.
		And she said, well, I'm not sure I want to.
		He said, I'll give you the proceeds of my Nobel Prize if I win one, if we get divorced.
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		It was a great deal.
		He says, and this is, he wrote these papers in 1905.
		He says, one of these papers will win the Nobel.
		If you give me the divorce, you will get the proceeds.
		The Nobel, as you know, is huge sums of money, especially back then.
		And she's very smart.
		She's a scientist, mathematician.
		She consults with Fritz Haber and others.
		She calculates the odds, takes the bet, and finally, I think in 1919 or so, he wins the prize.
		14 years later, she gets all the money and buys two apartment buildings in Zurich.
unidentified		Right.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		So his second wife, was he not related to his second wife?
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, his second wife was his cousin in two different ways.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Okay, and that marriage worked out?
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, Elsa was more of a companion, just like we talked about, Franklin and Deborah.
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		It was a companionship relationship, but Elsa was very good for Albert Einstein.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Now, you know, lots of times if you're a famous person, you have children, it can be a burden for the children.
		If your father is Albert Einstein, people must think, hey, you're pretty smart.
		What happened to who?
		He had two sons.
		What happened to them?
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		One of them had mental issues and ended up in an asylum.
		The other ended up at Caltech.
		So I guess that's a slightly different thing, but had to walk at Caltech past the bust of his father, but I think was very loving to his father.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Okay, so you mentioned something about Albert Einstein and the child, and we talked about the one he gave up.
		And that reminded me of something that's the most kind of interesting part of the book on Steve Jobs, at least the part I thought so was interesting.
		Steve Jobs was adopted.
		And at one point, his sister found out who their father was.
		And you can tell the story of, did he want to meet his father after all these years?
		And did he know who the father actually was?
		And did he want to meet him?
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		Yes, what happened was his sister, who's a novelist, said she reignites with Steve.
		They find out that they are basically a full brother and sister.
		But the father, who had been a graduate student from Syria in Wisconsin, had sort of gone off and disappeared.
		And she tracks him down and finds out he's running a, I think, coffee shop, a restaurant in Sacramento.
		And they go to find him, and Steve balks at the last minute and says, I don't want to see the guy.
		So she goes and sees the father, lost father, and he says to her, oh, I'm so sorry.
		And I wish you had seen me earlier.
		I used to have a great restaurant in San Jose.
		Everybody used to come to it, even Steve Jobs.
		And she bites her tongue and doesn't say, Steve Jobs is your son.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		And he died never knowing that Steve Jobs was dying?
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		No, he found out, but I don't think Steve had a stronger.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		But Steve never actually met him.
unidentified		No.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		So when you were doing the Steve Jobs book and the Einstein book, were you employed then at CNN or are you at Aspen?
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		The Steve Jobs book, I think I'd just gone to Aspen.
		And that was good because it gave me a lot of time to think and reflect.
		Einstein, I was still working as a journalist.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Now, when Einstein died, probably violating a lot of medical ethics, the surgeon who was there at the end took his brain out to examine whether he had some special features.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Whatever happened to that brain and did he have a different brain than everybody else?
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		It's amazing.
		So the guy who does the autopsy says, I'm not going to bury Einstein's brain, puts it in an ice chest and drives it around.
		It goes around America at times.
		And he studies it.
		There's some differences, but you're not going to find why Einstein is Einstein by looking at the neurotransmitter code.
		But he ended up keeping Einstein's brain.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Now, you wrote another book about the innovators, people who were involved in a lot of technology kind of breakthroughs.
		Robert Noyes, one of the founders of Intel and others.
		What did you discover about these innovators?
		Who were they and why did they kind of help the United States move forward in the technological revolution?
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		We biographers have a dirty little secret, which is we make it seem like some guy or gal goes to a garage or a garret, has a light bulb moment, innovation happens.
		We all know it's a team sport, that creativity is a collaborative effort.
		So I wanted to show that through the innovators, how all these people work together.
		And you had a magical time beginning, say, in 1955, Steve Jobs, Tim Berners-Lee, who does a World Wide Web, and Bill Gates are all born that year.
		And then what happens for Steve and Bill Gates is Silicon Valley happens.
		You have venture capitalists coming in and funding it.
		You have Stanford doing basic research.
		You have government funding of basic research.
		So you have, just as you had in Florence in 1500 when Leonardo comes from the village of Vinci, you had in Silicon Valley the cradle for innovation.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		So of those people in Silicon Valley at that time, who were the ones that were the, quote, geniuses?
		Was Robert Noyce one of them?
		Andy Johnson?
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		Well, Robert Noyce was a genius, but in a quiet, brilliant way to understand the microchip.
		But he partners, and this is the point of the innovators, it's teams.
		He partners with Gordon Moore, famous for Moore's Law, which talks about the increase of power of microchips.
		And he's a true genius.
		But neither of them can get chips out the door.
		So they have to get a third partner, which is Andy Grove.
		And it's about, just like writing the Declaration, how it's a team effort.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		So let's talk about Leonardo.
		It's one thing to write about people that have been around for, that are alive or recently alive or maybe alive only 200 years ago.
		Leonardo was alive like 500 years ago.
		How hard is it to get information about Leonardo and why were you so fascinated about him?
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		First of all, because he is the ultimate.
		As Steve Jobs said to me when he said, I want you to do my biography because you connect the humanities to the sciences.
		And then he said, and the ultimate of that is Leonardo, the guy who does Vitruvian Man, you know, the naked dude doing jumping jacks in the circle and square.
		And he said, that's the symbol of it.
		And the really great thing about Leonardo, and here we are in the National Archives, is that he left us more than 7,000 pages of his notebooks.
		You can just go page by page and see him sketching the people for the Last Supper, but also trying to do Fibonacci's equations by how curls work.
		With Steve Jobs, I tried to get his stuff from the 1990s.
		He and I tried to get the memos he wrote.
		They were in a next computer and the operating system doesn't work.
		Paper is a great technology.
		It has an operating system that never goes out.
		It has an infinite battery life.
		And so with Leonardo, we have these things.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Now, Leonardo was the illegitimate son of a notary in Italy.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		But his father didn't really make him a notary, is that right?
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		Every person I've written about has been a bit of a misfit as a kid.
		We've talked about Steve Jobs being adopted or Einstein being Jewish in Germany and stuff.
		And with Leonardo, he's born out of wedlock.
		He's left-handed.
		He's gay.
		He's in this village of Vinci.
		And his father could have legitimated him.
		Back then, the Catholic Church, there were ways to do things, and you could be legitimate your son, but doesn't do it.
		This is a godsend for Leonardo, because he would have been a horrible notary.
		But not being a notary, he got to go to Florence and become an artist and an engineer.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Ultimately, one time he's applying for a job, I think, for the Duke of Medici, and he says, I can do this, I can do that.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		And by the way, I can also paint a little.
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, no, he's going to Milan because he's age 30.
		He's reaching that horrible milestone you and I remember.
		And he has painted a few paintings, but not quite finished them, the Adoration of the Magi and others.
		He hasn't done his commissions for all the Medici.
		And so he writes a letter to the Duke of Milan that's just priceless.
		And he says, I can make weapons of war, I can do great engineering things, I can make public buildings, I can make bridges.
		And in the last paragraph of the 11-paragraph letter, he says, I can also paint and sculpt as well as anybody.
		And thus he does.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Now, how many extant paintings are there from Leonardo?
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		Somewhat controversial, but at least 12 that have been totally finished, and up to 18, depending on how you count things, like Salvador Mundi, the one that's disputed that I think Mohamed bin Salman bought.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		So let's talk about the most famous painting of them all, the Mona Lisa.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Why is it so famous and how long did he work on that?
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's the most famous because it's the greatest painting ever done.
		He worked on it for at least 15 years, carrying it with him wherever he went.
		And the thing that makes it miraculous is the science of it.
		He dissects the human eye, you know, as a scientist, to figure out that in the corner of your eye you see shadows and colors well, but in the center of your retina you see points.
		So he's able to make the smile of the Mona Lisa.
		The shadows go up on one side, but the details go down.
		So even as you move your head, the smile is enigmatic.
		It flashes on and off.
		Likewise, he does that with the eyes.
		So he dissects human faces to know every nerve that touches the lips and the eyebrows.
		So it's a triumph of science and art.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		And at one point, Jackie Kennedy, when she's First Lady, talks de Gaulle and the Minister of Culture in France into lending the Leonardo famous Mona Lisa to the National Gallery of Art, which is a couple blocks from here.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Was that a big deal in the United States when he came over?
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		It was a big deal in France.
		Governments of France have fallen for less.
		And de Gaulle had to be totally smitten by Jacqueline O'Nassis to allow it to come both here to the National Gallery and then I think to the Metropolitan Museum.
		As you know very well, the National Gallery has the only Leonardo painting in North America or probably outside of Europe, which is Ginevra da Benci, which is in some way the precursor to the Mona Lisa.
		It has many of the same elements.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		So if the Mona Lisa went for sale, which I guess it never would, the entire French government would fall, that's probably why.
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		The whole French government would fall if they renovated it, which they need to do.
		It's not really as dark as it seems.
		They've done that with some of Leonardo's other paintings.
		And at the Louvre, they're desperate to just take it out, take a year, clean off the grime and the dirt and the yellowing.
		But I don't think any French government can survive saying, okay, we'll take it out of commission.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		But it's not even painted on canvas, it's on wood more than that.
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		It's on wood, and he did that sometimes.
		And of course, when he does The Last Supper, he does it almost on plaster or on a wall.
		And so he was always experimenting in the case of The Last Supper to the detriment of the painting, but it works well for the Mona Lisa.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Now, Leonardo was also interested in a lot of inventions, and he designed the helicopters and things.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Did any of his inventions actually ever get implemented?
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		Not much.
		I mean, the famous helicopter, which looks like that corkscrew, I don't think you can even say the name without going like this, because you have to show it.
		That, of course, never works.
		But eventually, the theory behind it works.
		He does have these great weapons of war he's trying to do for the Duke of Milan and for other warlords he's working for.
		I think there's certain things he does that works, but he loved being an engineer, but it's mainly the architecture and some of the things he designed that worked the best.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Now, the people you've written about, the geniuses, were all men.
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		Well, Jennifer Doudna, who is...
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		But now you've decided to write a book about Jennifer Doudna.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Was that because your daughter said to you, write a book about a woman who's a genius as well?
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		Well, my daughter actually said when she was applying to college, and we of our generation think you're supposed to help them with the essay, and she wouldn't let me even read it.
		I said, who did you do?
		And she said, Ada Lovelace.
		I said, who's Ada Lovelace?
		She said, oh, dad, she invented the first computer algorithm.
		So Ada Lovelace becomes a framing device of a book, The Innovators I did.
		But after doing physics, with Einstein and the digital revolution, the next revolution is life sciences revolution.
		I said, how can I capture that?
		And I got to know all the people who are doing gene editing.
		And Jennifer Doudner said, she's the one who's going to win the Nobel Prize.
		And it's hard to hack the Swedish Academy, but we were able to make sure she won the Nobel Prize.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Well, you wrote a book about her, and as you're writing the book, and I don't remember, it was just the book was about to come out when she won the Nobel Prize?
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		Totally, yes.
		And there's a wonderful picture in the book, because she's at Berkeley, and at 5 a.m., she's told she's in the kitchen on the phone with her husband and little son.
		And the main question I had is, how did they get that picture?
		But Berkeley, every person who might win a Nobel Prize, they send a photographer that night to be on their porch.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		So she was somebody who grew up in Hawaii, and she was kind of told girls don't do science.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		How did she get so interested in science?
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		Well, you know, as I said, everybody I've written about was a bit of a misfit.
		Believe it or not, a tall, gangly, blonde, you know, American girl growing up in Ilo, Hawaii, which is all Polynesian.
		She felt an outsider.
		She decides she loves the snapping grass and all the wonders of nature in Hawaii.
		And she tells her high school guidance counsel, I want to be a scientist.
		And he said, girls don't do science.
		And that's great, because then she did.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		So another person you wrote a book about that got a lot of attention was a person named Elon Musk.
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		Another person whose childhood was a bit talented.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		So how did you get access to Elon Musk?
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		And did he let you do what Steve Jobs let you do, just wander around with him?
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		I was at a friend's house, my wife and I, and a mutual friend said, you know, you should do Elon Musk.
		I'd met him a few times.
		It did seem to fit in the pattern.
		He was taking us into space.
		He was taking us into the era of electric vehicles, doing artificial intelligence.
		So it seemed, so we had a phone conversation that lasted a little bit more than an hour.
		And we went through all the things and we talked about what he did.
		And I said, well, look, here's the deal I made with Steve Jobs.
		I get total access to you.
		It's not just based on interviews.
		I can be in any meeting by your side day and night, get a trailer in Boca Chica, Texas next to your house.
		He went, uh-huh.
		And then I said, and the second part is, you have no control.
		You don't get to read the book.
		He goes.
		Uh-huh.
		So I go downstairs, you know, friends were all there, and I'm thinking about this.
		And suddenly somebody says, oh my God, you're writing a biography of Elon Musk.
		I said, what do you mean?
		He says, Elon just tweeted out, Walter's writing my biography.
		I thought, okay, now I've got the tiger by the tail.
		I might as well do it.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		So how many years did you spend trailing him?
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		About three years.
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		And the good thing was he put nothing off limits.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		So how many companies can he run at one time?
		I'm always amazed how he could be the CEO and the founder of so many companies.
		Were you amazed that he could go from one to another to another without missing a beat?
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		People call him a multitasker, and that's wrong.
		What he is is a serial tasker who, like Napoleon, knows there's a detail on the battlefield that needs my attention and goes right there.
		So even the night that the Twitter board accepted his offer and he's going to suddenly buy Twitter, the world's going nuts about it.
		We're flying to Boca Chica, which is where SpaceX is.
		And he goes into the conference room and everybody says there's like 20 people in there and he just bought 20 of them.
		All he is is focusing on the Raptor engine and the wiring and the need for a heat shield in the Raptor engine and spends more than an hour deeply focused on that.
		And then suddenly switches attention once that meeting is over to full self-driving problem they're having and then to a problem at Twitter.
		So he just hour by hour serially focuses.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Is his skill set that he's smarter than everybody else or that he's just able to juggle so many different things at once?
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		What would you say his great genius is?
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		His genius is in material science and understanding exactly why Ingenel shouldn't be the head on the Raptor engine skill and in manufacturing things.
		Steve Jobs was brilliant at going around the design studio and saying, hey, let's make the curves on this iPhone this way.
		But then they tossed it over the ocean to China to have it built.
		Musk believes that if you're not manufacturing your own things, you're not able to iterate day after day.
		So SpaceX, Tesla, they're building the big factories.
		That's part of his genius.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Now, you finished the book before he went into the government to run Doge.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Were you surprised he decided he would go into government?
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		He was in the book, as you know, he's furious about Biden not inviting him to the Electric Vehicle Summit, his daughter having transitioned and he thinks it's all woke mind virus, all these things.
		So I watch him move from being an Obama supporter to being very anti-woke, very populist, right.
		And I knew that he wanted to go into government.
		It's a shame because had he gone into government and focused on what he's good at, like going to the Pentagon and saying, this procurement process is crazy, or the way you're building the F-35 is nuts, or to do things like that, he could have changed the government for good.
		But instead, unfortunately, he started, you know, let's get rid of this part of USAID and firing people.
		He was not suited to be in government.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		You mentioned his complicated childhood.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		It was a complicated relation with his father, is that right?
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		To put it mildly, yeah.
		His father, you know, when Elon got beaten up as a kid at school by bullies, he'd go home and his father said, it's your fault.
		You're useless.
		You're a loser.
		And would make him stand in front of him for an hour and berate him.
		And his father, as more has come out recently, but some is in the book, has children by his own stepdaughter.
		And so it's that darkness of Elon's childhood that gives him the drive, but also gives him the demons.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Now, you're working on a book now on Madame Curie.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		What has she done that is so distinctive?
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		Well, one of the great things we're talking about, great archives, is we also have her notebooks.
		And nobody's really going page by page through the archives and figuring out what did she do each day.
		We all know she's St. Marie Curie.
		And the interesting thing is right around 1900, when we have Einstein as a patent clerk trying to figure out relativity and other things, she's the person who best understands that chemistry is basically physics.
		It's how the electrons are revolving, how they radiate.
		She comes up with the concept of radioactivity, names it, discovers radium.
		And so that notion that's at the core of the 20th century comes from Marie Curie.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Now, she's the only person or the only woman to win two Nobel Prizes in different categories.
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		She's the only person ever in history to win a Nobel in two different sciences.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		And that book will come out in a year or so or two years or so.
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		A year or two.
		Yeah, you know, it's so much fun.
		And you know what you get to do?
		You get to go to Paris and the Curie archives or there in the Six Arom d'Ismonde, near the Sorbonne.
		So why would you rush it?
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		So in between Elon Musk and Marie Curie, you have just about to have a new book come out.
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		A small book that's almost a pamphlet like Thomas Paine's Common Sense, but it's called The Greatest Sentence Ever Written.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		What is the greatest sentence ever written?
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and they're endowed by the Creator with certain inalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		35 words that become our mission statement as a nation.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		And the reason it's so important is it's not only a mission statement for us, but for other countries as well?
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		Yes, yes.
		And it forms the common ground for the American dream.
		And you can see how our founders, I love going word by word through it, because Jefferson writes the first draft.
		He puts in, we hold these truths to be sacred.
		Then we see Franklin cross it out with his printer's pen and put self-evident because he wants it to be based on logic, not religion.
		You see, endowed with inalienable rights, and you see by their creator from John Adams.
		So even in the balancing of a half of a sentence, you see this ability to say the role of divine providence and the role of rationality in our nation.
		And we've lost that ability to do balance.
		So as we go into the 250th, I would just hope everybody in the United States and around the world would just appreciate this sentence.
		And maybe that would lower the temperature of our partisan divide.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Now, how did Jefferson say all men are created equal when he had more than 700 slaves in his life?
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		It's a great contradiction embed, or the tragic contradiction, embed in the founding of our nation.
		Because indeed, he writes, all men are created equal.
		And when George Mason does it in the precursor document, the Bill of Rights, the Rights of Virginia, he puts when they enter into society.
		But Jefferson just keeps all men are created equal.
		It becomes a forcing mechanism because, as you know, four score and seven years later, at the Gettysburg Cemetery, Lincoln refers to that sentence, saying, a nation dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
		So it becomes a forcing document to make us better.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		What about women?
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		How come he didn't say all men and women are equal?
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		Well, as you know, Abigail Adams writes to John Adams, who's on the drafting committee, what about don't forget the ladies?
		And John Adams writes, we're not giving up our masculine rights.
		But the cool thing about the sentence is that it wasn't a description or declaration of the way things were at the time.
		It was the aspirational document.
		So you look at 249 and a half years since then.
		We have expanded what does it mean?
		Who's included?
		Not just white male property owners, but over each generation, whether it's the 7,000 people killed at Gettysburg or the civil rights movement with Dr. King, we expand that sentence to make it so that all people are part of that sentence.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Now, Adams was a member of a five-person committee to draft the Declaration.
		He said to Jefferson, you draft it, you're more popular from Virginia and so forth.
		I'm dislike, Adams would say about himself.
		But did Adams later resent the fact that Jefferson got all this credit and he was the author of it, as he said on his epitaph?
		Or did Adams say, well, he deserves it?
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		No.
		Adams, of course, was resentful, as he was of Benjamin Franklin.
		He's a great person, but he was kind of resentful.
		And he let Jefferson be the drafter because Adams thought that Adams had done the most important thing, which is on July 2nd, 1776, there's a motion to declare independence.
		And so Adams thought that for henceforth we'd be celebrating July 2nd as our birthday.
		And he was really annoyed.
		You can explain why the first year afterwards, they end up celebrating July 4th and Jefferson gets the credit.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Well, what happened was in 1777, they were so busy working in the Continental Congress, they forgot the date, and they took them a day or two to get organized.
		They said, we'll celebrate on July the 4th.
		And for 50 years after that, Adams and Jefferson disparred over whether what was more important, the July the 2nd vote or the July the 4th Declaration.
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		One of the really poignant things, though, is 50 years after the signing of that declaration, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson die on the same day.
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		And they had reconciled finally at the end and write some beautiful letters to each other.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		People thought at the time that that was a sign of providence, that basically these two great founders died within a couple hours of each other on July the 4th, 50 years today.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		So all these geniuses, if you could have dinner with any one of these geniuses, who would you want to have dinner with and why?
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		Well, Franklin would be the most fun.
		I mean, he had big casts of ale and port and Madeira.
		When George Washington comes to Philadelphia, he opens his new dining room.
		And he's a great rock and tour and storyteller.
		But the most interesting dinner, of course, would be with Leonardo.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Because he was doing so many things.
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		Leonardo was the last person in history who, I think, knew everything you could possibly know about everything that was knowable and saw the patterns that rippled across creation.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		One thing we didn't mention about him is that he took a lot of dead bodies as cadavers and basically dissected them so he could see how the body worked, right?
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		And then he would dissect the face so he could see the nerves and muscles when he's painting the Mona Lisa.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		But it wasn't legal to do that in some cases, right?
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it was against the Catholic Church doctrine.
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		he couldn't do it in Florence, I think he ends up in, it must have been Venice where he gets to do the.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		So for people that want to be the next Walter Isaacson, write about geniuses or write so many different books while they have other jobs, what would your advice be?
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		Well, with all due respect to C-SPAN and everything else, is don't watch a whole lot of TV and get the heck off of social media.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		So for example, when you're writing and somebody's emailing you, do you respond to the email right away or the text?
		Or do you just kind of hive yourself off and just say, I'm writing for three hours.
		How many hours a day do you write before you stop?
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		I'm a night person, which helps.
		And one secret about being a night person is you should marry a morning person.
		So, you know, Kathy has her time in the morning and all the bustling.
		And at 9 p.m., she's tired, she's reading, and I'll spend three or four hours starting at 9 p.m. where you get no distractions.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		And you write for a couple hours, or do you say, I've got to write a couple pages?
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		How do you do that?
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		I like writing.
		And people say, how do you do it?
		It's like golf.
		How do people play three, four rounds of golf?
		They love it.
		Well, I sit there and all the worries drain from every muscle in my body because I have a little mantra, a little slogan on my computer that says, let me tell you a story.
		Because whenever I get stumped, instead of trying to write some complicated analysis, I say, what's the most interesting tale, anecdote I can tell that will illustrate this?
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Now, given all the number one bestsellers you've written and the famous books, do you have an editor who actually still edits you or you don't need an editor at this point?
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		Well, I definitely had, over the course of most of my career, Alice Mayhew, a legendary editor at Simon Schuster, who did Woodwood and Bernstein, helped create the concept of all the president's men.
		And Alice Mayhew, in the very first book I wrote with a friend, which was about six friends and the Cold War, she kept writing in the margin, a tigta, and it stood for all things in good time.
		Don't get ahead of the story, don't get behind it, keep it chronological.
		And I said, Alice, why?
		She said, if it's good enough for the good Lord doing the Bible, he has the best opening sentence in the beginning, comma.
		And so Alice is always in my head as my editor.
		I now have another great editor, Priscilla Payton.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Now, do you have people coming up to you from time to time at cocktail parties saying, well, I am a genius myself, and maybe you could write my biography.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		You get a lot of those?
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		They always say, I'm just like Einstein.
		I said, what do you mean?
		He said, well, I think out of the box, just like Einstein does.
		And I say, yeah, but he do what was in the box before he thought out of it.
		I do have a lot of people, and this is not a plug, but with a group of my students at Tulane and others, computer science, we're creating a company called Boswell and Company, which, you know, students will hear your story.
		AI will help process it, because I believe everyone deserves to have their story told.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		So right now, you gave up being the president of Aspen Institute voluntarily.
		They would love you to have stayed.
		And you moved back to your hometown of New Orleans, and you teach at Tulane, and you do other kinds of things, writing your books and so forth.
		So what is the greatest pleasure of your life?
		Writing the books, interviewing the people, being interviewed on C-SPAN, things like that?
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		I sound hokey.
		I love my students.
		I love every Tuesdays and Thursdays.
		I teach a couple of courses, engaging with them, getting the energy and the feedback, and especially in this troubled time to watch them chew on what's happening.
		I never would have guessed how much fun it is to be at Tulane with some really cool students.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Have you ever been interested in going into government service at any point?
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I was, and I never had that opportunity.
		If I'm going to be honest, you look back on your life and you say, okay, what was it you could have done?
		Should I have run for mayor of New Orleans?
		Because I love the city so much.
		At one point, there were a couple of times I was asked to go into the White House once, right when Steve Jobs was nearing the end, so I couldn't.
		So yeah, in life, there's certain things you didn't get to do, but I really admire people who get into the arena.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Let's talk about your parents.
		Did they see your success?
		Your parents?
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, you know, I talk about all the geniuses I've written about had these challenging, misfit childhoods.
		For me, it was the opposite, which is why I get to write about geniuses, but I'm not one myself, which is my father and mother were the nicest, most honorable, and smartest people I ever met.
		And my brother and I, I still live in New Orleans within about seven blocks of our Napoleon Avenue house where I grew up.
		And it was just glorious to be in the most interesting city with the most loving parents.
		My father was an engineer, which helped.
		And so we would do electric circuits in the basement and test vacuum tubes and stuff.
		And he gave me my interest in science.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		But did both of them or either of them live to see all your success?
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yeah, they both did.
		And they were very proud, but they kept me grounded, which is why it's good to be back in New Orleans, which is, you know, I can brag that I was on C-SPAN.
		And my friends, I once, I'll tell you a story about being on C-SPAN once.
		Our 35 closest friends from high school have New Year's Eve together every time, upstairs at Antoine's.
		So one night we had this great New Year's Eve party, and the next day, after being a bit hungover, one of my friends, I talked to him, he says, that's amazing.
		How did you go from the dinner to be, I said, what do you mean?
		He said, well, when I got home all drunk, I turned on C-SPAN and there you were.
		And I said, oh, no, that was pre-recorded.
		In New Orleans, they don't understand the virtues of videotape.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Some people have said there's another genius that you should write about, and that would be an autobiography that you would write about your life.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Have you considered that?
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		You know, those of us who write about people in the arena should not fall prey to the conceit that we're also in the arena ourselves.
		Someday I'll get my little Boswell and company and write a little memoir for my family.
		But no, I'd resist thinking that it's like Boswell, you know, the biographer of Dr. Johnson.
		Somebody actually wrote an okay biography of Boswell, but you don't care about Boswell.
		You care about the people who are in the arena.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		So had you not become a journalist and an executive, do you think you might have ever gone into something important like private equity?
unidentified		Yeah, right.
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		No, I always.
		The Carlisle group hadn't been invented yet.
		When I graduated from college, I had studied John Locke and philosophy at Harvard and then Oxford.
		And I thought I actually wanted to be an academic philosopher.
		But I also had worked for the Times Piki Union in New Orleans and stuff.
		And I went back to see my old philosophy professors at Harvard and said, I'm trying to decide, here's my thesis on Locke, whether I should become an academic or whether I should be a journalist.
		And both of them said to me, you would make a great journalist.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		So any regrets so far about your career?
		You seem to have a career that everybody would be envious of.
		You run a lot of big organizations successfully.
		You've written the bestsellers, all number one bestsellers.
		Any regrets, anything you wish you had done but you haven't done yet?
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		Oh yeah, there are things I could have done and couldn't have been in government or whatever.
		However, I think it's very important every day to wake up in every hour to make yourself think how grateful you are.
		I think a problem we have in our society is people have chips on their shoulder.
		They're resentful.
		Well yeah, there's a lot of reasons you can be resentful.
		But if you wake up each day and say, my goodness, I have gratitude.
		I was born in the best zip code in the best city, in the best country, at the best time.
		And there's always something you should be grateful for.
		And I think you're not going to be happy unless you keep saying to yourself, boy, am I a lucky person.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Now, you have a daughter.
		Is it hard to be the only child of a famous writer and person like you?
		And what does she do?
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		She works for a newsletter and journalism thing, but she always says, oh, dad, dad, dad.
		You know, I don't think she likes me hovering.
		She's a wonderful kid.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		She must be impressed with what you've achieved.
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		And her friends come over and she may be impressed by what I achieved, but she's smart enough not to let me know it.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		My God.
		Well, look, it's very impressive what you've achieved, and I want to thank you for being with us today and letting us hear about your life story, which is quite impressive.
		And we look forward to reading your new book, The Greatest Sentence Ever Written.
		And then we'll read about Marie Curie shortly as well, right?
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		Thank you so much.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		And then after that, when we will have another one, right?
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		I don't know.
		I don't know.
		Well, yeah, there'll always be somebody.
		There's always some interesting story to tell.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Thanks very much, Walter.
unidentified		you, David.
unidentified		Walter Isaacson and David Rubenstein viewed the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution in the Rotunda of the National Archives.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Now, this is the original copy of the Declaration of Independence.
		It's faded beyond recognition.
		The reason is it was folded up many times and put in storage when the British were invading in 1814.
		This was put together in a package and it was buried in Leesburg, Virginia, hiding it from the British.
		Ultimately, it was put on display at the patent office for about 30 years in a row and faded a lot.
		Ultimately, you know, it was decided that we would have perfect copies made, so replicas were made.
		This was not signed on July the 4th, despite the fact it was agreed to on July the 4th, because on July the 4th, the British were invading and controlling New York.
		And therefore, the New York delegation couldn't come to vote for this.
		So they said, here's what we'll do.
		We want to get an engrossed copy, clean up the text.
		We'll get an engrossed copy, and then we'll have the delegates come back in early August.
		It was signed between August 2, 3, and 4 when delegates came back to sign it.
		And signing it was not that easy a thing to do because it was treason.
		So when they adopted the document on July the 4th, nobody's name went on it.
		So nobody had committed treason publicly.
		The British didn't know who signed it.
		When they came back in August, they did sign it, but it wasn't released publicly until I think January of the subsequent year because there had been some victories and maybe the people thought it wasn't so likely that the United States would lose.
		But anyway, it wasn't revealed publicly until, I think, about January of 1770, 1777.
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		This is amazing.
		And these are the most profound three words you can imagine beginning to get documented, which is we, the people.
		Because for the first time, it was a contract that wasn't the rights come from conquest or for tribalism or from the divine right of kings.
		It's we the people.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Now, that wasn't the original draft, though, when they were thinking about it.
		They had, I think they were saying we the people of the states or we the states.
		And then they came out of a committee.
		They had a committee that was supposed to clean up all the parts and it came back from the committee, We the People.
walter isaacson ▲ ● ▼		It's one of the natural tensions, that's a glorious tension in American life, which is to what extent we're a democracy of the people and to what extent we're a federation of states.
		And of course, they were wrestling with it back then, and we're still wrestling with it now.
		But they begin the document with we the people, and it just means every citizen, not every person, but mainly white male landowners.
		But eventually that gets expanded and we the people becomes an expansive concept that more and more people, women, blacks, minorities, all get included into.
unidentified		See more with Walter Isaacson in the Rotunda of the National Archives on America's Book Club, The Treasures.
		Available at c-span.org slash ABC and C-SPAN's YouTube page.
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