 Welcome, I'm Mark Uptegrove, President and CEO of the LBJ Foundation. While the LBJ Presidential Library is close to the public in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, we're pleased to continue to bring you thoughtful, inspiring conversations through our virtual series. On behalf of our co-host, Humanities Texas, welcome to an evening with best-selling author Walter Isaacson. Walter is a professor of history at Tulane University, and has served as CEO of the Aspen Institute, Chairman of CNN, and Editor of Time Magazine. He is the best-selling author of biographies on Leonardo da Vinci, Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, and Henry Kissinger. This evening, we'll be exploring his newest book, The Codebreaker, Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race. Now, please join me in welcoming Walter Isaacson. Walter Isaacson, welcome. We are delighted. I've been trying to get you to the LBJ Library for years. This is the next best thing, but welcome. We're delighted to have you. Hey, I can't wait to get over there. I'm down in New Orleans. It's not too far away. And I love the LBJ Library. Well, count on an invitation to come to the actual edifice, Walter, when we reopen. But it's wonderful to see you, albeit virtually. And congratulations on the publication of The Codebreaker. It is a fascinating read, and I'm looking forward to talking with you about it. But I want to talk about the subtitle, which is Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race. We'll talk about the very light subject of the Future of the Human Race in a moment, but let's start with Jennifer Doudna and Gene Editing. How does one relate to another? Jennifer Doudna, who won the Nobel Prize last October, did so for creating a tool that will edit our genes. And what it's called is CRISPR. And it's based on a technology that, you know, bacteria, they've been using it for a billion years. And what bacteria do is they have clustered, repeated sequences, hence the name CRISPR, in their DNA that record every time a virus attacks them. And then if the virus attacks again, the CRISPR system has a scissors called an enzyme that can chop it up. Now, this is of course very useful in this age when we're being attacked by virus pandemics, but what Jennifer Doudna and her partner, Emanuel Schopenche, figured out is how do you take this system that bacteria have and make it into a tool that can edit our own DNA at whatever location, whatever gene we pick that we want edited, this CRISPR tool can do it. It can also be used to fight cancer, it can be used to fight viruses. So it's going to transform medicine and for that matter the human race. So let's talk about Jennifer Doudna, talk a little bit, Walter, about her background and how it led her to become this breakthrough chemist. Yeah, she was born and raised in Hawaii and she was sort of an outsider because she was in a small village called Ila Hawaii and all the other students were Polynesian, but she was a tall, blonde, lanky girl from the mainland. And so she felt like a bit of an outsider, which is the way a lot of great creative people always look at life from both the inside and the outside. And when she was in the sixth grade, her dad left on her bed a book called The Double Helix. I'm sure, Mark, you remembered it was James Watson's wonderful book about how he and Francis Crick using some images by Rosalind Franklin discovered the structure of DNA. And Jennifer Doudna read it as a young girl, noticed the character of Rosalind Franklin and said, wow, women can become scientists. And so she decided she wanted to become a scientist, but her guidance counselor at school said, no, no, no girls don't do science. Well, she persisted. It made her more all the more want to become a scientist. So she becomes a scientist and she specializes in RNA, which is, you know, the brother or sister of DNA, the sibling of DNA, but it's a molecule that actually does work. You know, DNA just sits there in the nucleus of our cell not really doing anything except for guarding our genetic code whereas the RNA actually takes that code and makes proteins. And it turns out to be a much more useful molecule. That's why we use it to make the vaccines that Pfizer and Moderna have developed that are saving us from coronavirus. And that's why Jennifer also used it to make this tool that can add genes. I want to talk about her background for one second and go back to what you said about her feeling like an outsider. You write that most creative people, including people I have chronicled, such as Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, Henry Kissinger and Steve Jobs grew up feeling alienated from their surroundings. Jennifer Daubler, as you said, is no exception. How does that feeling of alienation contribute to the creativity and innovation of these iconic figures? I tend to think that feeling like a bit of an outsider, certainly Leonardo da Vinci is the ultimate because he's born out of wedlock and he's gay and he's left-handed and he's distracted. And as a young kid, he moves from the village of Vinci to Florence and they embrace him. The Medici family think that he's the most talented kid they've seen, but it also allowed him, but it allowed Jennifer Daubler, Steve Jobs, who was adopted as a child and felt out of place in the home in which he was raised. It makes you question, think out of the box, say, what is my role in this cosmos? How do I fit in? And all of the people I write about want to learn everything you can possibly know about almost any subject, including how do we fit in? I want to go back to Jean editing in a moment, but more broadly, you write in the book's introduction, the invention of CRISPR and the plague of COVID will hasten the transition in the third great revolution of modern times. These revolutions arose from discovery, beginning just over a century ago of the three fundamental kernels of our existence, the atom, the bit and the gene. Talk about these revolutions and how they have contributed to human history. Well, as you say, the atom, the bit and the gene, they're just fundamental kernels. And they're all discovered sort of around the beginning of the 20th century, and each sparks its own revolution. The first half of the 20th century was a revolution in physics based on the papers of Albert Einstein in 1905 and the notion of the atom and its particles. And from that, you get everything from atomic bombs to space travel to semiconductors. And I wrote about that in my Einstein book, but the second great revolution of our time begins around the 1950s with the invention of the internet, the computer and the microchip, all based on the notion of bits, which means binary digits, on-off digits. And it turns out you can encode all information, whether it be pictures or sounds or words or numbers, in bits and you can manipulate them in circuits with on-off switches. That leads to the digital revolution and that's what my Steve Jobs book was about and the book The Innovators was about. Well, around the year 2000, we finally finished sequencing the human gene, a genome. In other words, all the three billion latter pairs in our DNA. And that didn't actually get us very far. It just showed us where our genes were. But beginning with that, we learned how to rewrite some of those genes and that's what my book is about. It's about using tools such as CRISPR to be able to rewrite our genes so that we can do things like fight genetic diseases, fend off coronaviruses or other viruses or for that matter, bacteria or any infection, fend off cancers. All of these things will be the most consequential invention of the first half of the 21st century and also the deepest moral question, which is when should we edit our genes? When should we design our children to have genes that we would prefer? These are gonna be really tough questions and they're not, the science isn't difficult but thinking through the moral implications is difficult, which is why I want people to understand it. You can go on this journey of discovery with me and Jennifer Doudin and the other wonderful characters in the book and it'll be very clear how all this works and then the rest of us then can then discuss, all right, now, what do we do with this technology? Talk about the process by which CRISPR was developed, Walter, what does that look like? Well, you know, great discoveries are usually based on curiosity, curiosity about basic science and basic science often leads in unexpected ways to inventions and technologies. So CRISPR begins generally, you could start with the story of a Spanish graduate student named Francisco Mojica who is there in Alcheante, Spain on the Mediterranean coast and he's sequencing microorganisms like archaea and bacteria that live in very salty ponds and in weird places. And he notices that they have clustered repeated segments in their DNA. He says, what's this all about? And then he finally figures out that maybe it's from fighting off viruses that have attacked them. He names them CRISPR. He starts working with two people at a yogurt company, Dinesco, why? Because yogurt and cheese companies, their big product is these starter cultures of bacteria that make the yogurt, make the cheese, but they often get attacked by viruses. So the people there were saying, all right, let's look at how they fend off viruses. Anyway, this is a wonderful story of all this basic curiosity, but even as the journey begins, we're starting to see useful things like, hey, we can protect the yogurt better. And then eventually when Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuel Sharpentay and Julian Banfield and then Feng Zhang at MIT and Harvard get involved, they say, here's how we adapt it to become a tool to edit our genes or detect coronaviruses. So what I'm hearing here is it takes a village and you write in the book that the discovery of CRISPR was really around a team and that science is essentially a team sport, but you also assert that it helps to be fiercely competitive, stubborn and inquisitive. It's just team sport and creativity is a collaborative effort, but it's not all just about great groups of people doing things. I'm always amazed at the difference that individuals can make. People like Jennifer Doudna who are persistent and stubborn and push and get things done. So when you write history and when you write an adventure story like this, you have to both weave in all of the really interesting people like George George and Feng Zhang and Julian Banfield and Emmanuel Sharpentay who are part of this process of creating CRISPR, but you also wanna show that individuals can, put their finger on the surface of history and it ripples. How does a business play a role in all this? You have basic science, you have academics, you have government that funds these things, but you also have business and business is an incredibly key part of it. Way back in 1945, the government science advisor Vannevar Bush talked about how he had to have a partnership between government-based and funded basic research, academics and business. And he understood what he was talking about. He had founded Raytheon. He had been Dean of Engineering at MIT and then he helped oversee science like the Manhattan Project and World War II. So America benefits from having this three-legged stool of which business is an important part. As I said, it's the Denisco food-making company based in France and in Madison, Wisconsin that helped figure out, okay, not only what is CRISPR, I mean, what is it supposed to do in bacteria, but then how do we make it a tool? And then secondly, when Jennifer Doudna discovers how to make this gene editing technique, and so does Emmanuel Sharpenther and so does Feng Zhang, they form companies, including Mammoth Biosciences which Jennifer Doudna formed and Sherlock Biosciences which Feng Zhang formed that are now creating these home test kits we could use in 10 minutes to see if we have the coronavirus. So in the end, we see that if you wanna make something practical, and by the way, if you wanna fund basic research, people like me, I believe in patents and an electoral property and business, because that's the way things move from bench to bedside. And by that I mean the lab bench where some genius can seize it to the bedside where it gets applied to a patient. One of the purposes of the book you write is to convey the importance of basic science, meaning the quest, you mentioned this earlier, that are curiosity driven rather than application oriented. What do you mean by that? I think that sometimes we say, well, let's pursue this question just to be useful, we're gonna find some tool, it's gonna have some application, and that's great, you wanna do that. But most great scientific advances just out of curiosity driven research that then after we've discovered something based on pure curiosity, we say, oh, I get it, that can have an application. People in the 1930s and early 1940s at universities around America and Europe, Bell Labs and other places, are trying to figure out how do electrons dance on the surface of semiconductor material? Einstein even went to Bell Labs and Einstein's theories of quantum mechanics go into exactly how do things work on the surface state of semiconductor materials? That's just basic curiosity, you know what that was gonna lead to. Well, it leads to the transistor which becomes the microchip, which becomes the engine of the digital revolution. So I think that if we abandon research that's just pure curiosity driven, we're gonna fail to have the seed corn that will grow into technologies in the future. So how do you nurture that, Walter? Let me put it another way. Are we doing a good job of nurturing that in our businesses and in our universities? Yes, I think America does a great job of research and development at universities in particular, partly because of Vannevar Bush and others in World War II who said, instead of government building its own labs, the way it did for the atom bomb with Oak Ridge and Los Alamos, instead, let's have government fund basic research at great research universities. University of Texas is really, really high on the list of places that gets government grants from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency DARPA, which is a lot of funding for pure basic research. And we do that very well. For example, a lot of basic research was done on RNA without people knowing what it was going to lead to. And eventually at the University of Pennsylvania, you have a couple of people, Professor Carrico, she discovers I can take the RNA that serves as a messenger telling ourselves what proteins to build and I can tweak it to tell ourselves to build other types of protein. And I can make sure I can configure it in a way that our body's not going to reject it. That was a while back. That was just sort of pure research. But then a few years ago, a company named Madonna decides, all right, I'm going to buy the rights to that discovery and I'm going to see if I can make drugs and vaccines. And thus you get the mRNA vaccine, the messenger RNA vaccine. So this is what I mean. And we do it well in this country. Now, sometimes a couple of political things happen. You've studied politics enough to understand. Sometimes we just cut back on research and science. We say, we got to cut the budget, let's cut the National Science Foundation. I mean, we can do without studying RNA and bacteria or let's cut the National Institutes of Health. Nobody's really saying that right now in the middle of a coronavirus crisis. Nobody's saying, let's cut Francis Collins and Tony Fauci's budget. But a few years ago, people were saying that. And sometimes what they say, and everybody from Harry Truman to Newt Gingrich to the Senate does not partisan, they'll say, let's not focus on basic research. Let's just focus on practical applications. And that's understandable. They'll make fun of something in the science budget like studying how bubble bees do something or how bacteria do something. But when we make those cuts, we sacrifice, as I said, the seed corn. That will be the discoveries that will lead to future technology. I was on the Director's Council of the National Institutes of Health and I saw some of the cutback and it meant a lot of research projects and universities weren't getting funded, especially by young researchers. And by the way, the ones at University of Pennsylvania studying messenger RNA, Professor Carrico and others had trouble getting funding. Well, I tell you, if that research had been totally cut, we'd be in a pickle right now. You are a master storyteller. Do you have a favorite story within the broader story that you're telling in the code breaker about gene editing? Well, one important story is, this is an amazingly useful technology to be able to help the health of our species. But one day Jennifer Doudna had a nightmare, she told me. And the nightmare was somebody wanted to learn about the technology. So she goes in the room to meet this person and the person looks up and it's Adolf Hitler. And she says, okay, this could fall into the wrong hands. People could use gene editing to create what they might think is a master race or even we well-intentioned humans could say, oh, let's modify our children. I want my kid to be taller or have more muscle mass or maybe better memory and things like that. And for her, it became a question of, how do we wrestle with these moral questions? She gathered scientists, but it's not just up to the scientists. She gathered people, everybody from politicians to just regular people to talk about, this is a good technology. We really want it because our kids or our family suffer from Alzheimer's or sickle cell or cystic fibrosis. But we also want to have some guardrails. So people aren't just paying money to enhance their children in ways that might not be good for the species or we're not editing out the diversity of our species. So that's one of my favorite stories because it just shows a scientist pivoting and saying, let me consider the moral implications. Another favorite story is the one the book leads with and then is near the end, which is exactly a year ago, March, 2020. Jennifer Doudna takes her only child, a 17-year-old boy named Andy, to the train to go compete in a robot competition, building competition in Fresno, California. She wakes up in the middle of the night. She knows Berkeley is about to close because of the coronavirus that's spreading. She wakes up her husband, they jump in the car, find an all-night gas station and go pick up Andy at this camp, this robot competition. He's an only child, as I said, so he was really unhappy to see his parents if he's embarrassed. But as they were driving away, they get a text that says robot competition canceled, all kids are supposed to go home. And that's when she knew she should turn her attention with all the things she had been doing with CRISPR and gene editing, said, okay, now let's turn our attention to fighting this pandemic. And so that to me shows two pivot points where a really interesting person says, I've done this and you have to pivot to doing that. I want to go back to the moral and ethical implications of gene editing. We write that figuring out if and when to edit our genes will become one of the most consequential questions of the 21st century. There are immense implications in all that. And you further quote James Watson who discovered the double helix with Francis Crick as saying, if scientists don't play God, who will? So what role does science play in all this and how do they play God but do so in a benevolent and responsible manner? Well, I answer James Watson's question not with scientists are the ones who are supposed to play God. My answer is nobody's supposed to play God but when it comes to determining how we're going to use this technology it's not up to just the scientists and it's not up to just the politicians. It's going to be up to all of us. We're going to have to do it and by we, I mean, you Mark and me because it's a social moral question we're all going to have to wrestle with which is should we allow it to fight off bad deadly genetic diseases? Of course we should. Should we edit our children so that our human race will no longer be susceptible to certain viruses? Well, that sounds like science fiction but in 2018 the Chinese scientists did that edited twin embryos becomes twin girls so they wouldn't be susceptible to HIV the virus that causes AIDS. Well, that was pretty horrible at scene people, you know, wave their hands and said this is, you know, we're not ready for this but now having gone through this virus pandemic we have to ask that question. If we could edit our species so that we were less susceptible to viruses and we can do it safely, should we? Now, I don't answer all these questions in the book if you're going to skip to the last chapter and say tell me, where's the answer sheet? No, I say we've got to walk hand in hand and I do some case studies, some thought experiments and I tell you and I hope I guide the reader saying here's where I come out. First of all, let's only do it if it's medically necessary let's not try to enhance our species before we fix things that are medically necessary and let's try to do it in patients who can give consent before we try to do it in embryos that'll be inheritable at it. But these are questions that you and I are just as good as answering as the scientists are or the politicians are but before we answer that I want you to go on this journey of discovery with me so that you can understand what the questions are. And you come out of this exploration relatively sanguine. I come out joyful and celebratory at the things we are going to be able to do to fight things like coronavirus pandemics to eliminate horrible diseases like cystic fibrosis, sickle cell anemia, Heimington's, multiple sclerosis. And I come out of it hopeful about ways that we can make ourselves safer as a species maybe prevent even things like Alzheimer's or memory loss from occurring in the next few decades. But having said that, I also see the potential for misuse gets into the wrong hand. If somebody decides to create a mosquito that's a super mosquito in a spreader, hey, that can be that or even as Vladimir Putin has said, we could use CRISPR, he said this to a youth group. We could use CRISPR to create super soldiers who don't feel pain and are unaffected by radiation. Well, we got to have some international rules of the road about how we use these things. So how do you regulate? What's the regulatory body by which you monitor this and ensure that there isn't somebody rogue who develops something along the lines of what Vladimir Putin was proposing? Well, first of all, we can't sort of say we should only do it if we can absolutely assure that it'll never, no rogue person will ever do it. I mean, all throughout everything we do, we try to make rules and regulations even though some things will fall between the cracks or slip through. We have laws against shoplifting and laws against trafficking and elephant tusks or sex trafficking or everything else. And yeah, some, a few bad actors may do it, but we're able to keep it under control if all of us as a society say, this is something we don't wanna have happen. People who do it are outlawed. People who brag about doing it are shamed, shamed, we can try to have social and legal and international sanctions. Specifically, all medical procedures in the US are pretty much regulated by the FDA. You can get off-label vaccines. You can probably go to, you know, different countries and try to get, but generally most of the medicine, most procedures we use come from the FDA. Likewise, around the world, there are FDAs in every different country. There's also science foundations in each other countries and Royal Academies of Science and National Academy of Science. Jennifer Douda enlisted all of these international scientific and regulatory societies, including those in China, Russia, Europe, United States, come together every six months or so in a summit to try to figure this out. And that includes work by the World Health Organization. So Mark, I can assure you will ever have regulations that nobody will ever violate. But I think like almost anything, if we have the will to, we can keep it under control and say let's use it for good, but let's try to prevent people from using it for things we decide, we, meaning us, decide are not moral uses of this technology. You mentioned, Walter, that Doudna won the 2020 Nobel Prize for Chemistry along with Emmanuel Charpentier, another renowned scientist who you mentioned earlier. But until 2020, I'm shocked to find out in your penultimate chapter that until 2020, only five women had won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry beginning with Marie Curie in 1911. So of the 184 honorees, only five or less than 3% were women. Does Jennifer Douda's enormous success in this area change things for women in the sciences? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, I hope so. She in sixth grade read that book, The Double Helix, noticed Rosalind Franklin, who by the way, died before the Nobel Prize was given and was never given the prize for DNA. It goes to Watson and Crick, but she has a role model and that's Rosalind Franklin. I hope a new generation, not only of the readers listening to this podcast, but their kids, when they put something on their bed for their kids to read, will read books like this. And whether it's a daughter reading the book or a son reading the book, they'll say, yeah, that's a role model. That's somebody I want to follow. When Jennifer Douda was told by her school guidance counselor, girls don't do science. The great refutation now is biographies like the one I've done, but more importantly, Nobel Prizes that say, you know what? We can all do science. The CRISPR was a breakthrough, obviously, in science, but we live in a country where science is routinely questioned. We've seen that in the last year with COVID and global warming. So how can scientists engender the trust of Americans in science itself? Well, that's another reason I wrote this book because I think the best way to engender trust in science is to make it understandable. And we can all walk along on a journey of discovery with people who are engaged in science because if something is mystifying then it becomes a bit scary. But if you understand, okay, this is how vaccines work. And if you understand, this is how they develop these technologies, then boom, you're going to feel more comfortable with it. I think we have gone through a very bad period where people have lost faith in all sorts of experts or institutions and whatever. And they've also, for some reason, reduced their reliance or faith in science. I think that the coronavirus pandemic will change that because there was great skepticism about vaccines. But whoa, this is a miracle that within a year we got vaccines that are beating back this pandemic. You're watching it in Texas, I'm watching it in Louisiana. Boom, I've been vaccinated. I'm not gonna start, I mean, some people will say I don't wanna be vaccinated, I don't believe in science. But 80, 90% of the people will say, hey, okay, I've now decided I want that vaccine. So I think coming out of the coronavirus pandemic and many other things and reading, I hope, books like the book I've written, people say, you know what, nature is beautiful and science is beautiful. I had the great pleasure of working with you at Time Magazine in the latter part of the 20th century. And you embarked on a project as editor of Time Magazine in which you endeavored to name the 100 most important people of the 20th century. It became the Time 100, which has become a time franchise. I've got this book, Walter, another book that you did with Dan Rather in this case, in which you profile those 100 people. But you had to come to the decision about who was the most important person of the 20th century. And you arrived at Albert Einstein for the very reasons you suggested earlier because the atom was such an important development in the 20th century. But we've only gone through a fifth of the 21st century, Walter. If you were to name the most important person of the 21st century to this point, who would it be? You know, we're always tempted to pull a politician out of a hat or a leader and you work at the LBJ library. And by the way, I had dinner last night with Doris Kearns Goodwin and a couple of other people. We're talking about LBJ and how consequential he was. Michael Eric Dyson was at dinner. We're talking about the 64 Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, how one person can be that consequential. And politicians tend to be very consequential. But if you look back, let's, you know, with the hindsight of history, a century or so, if I look back at the 19th century, and I say who was the most consequential person, you could name a whole bunch of politicians. But in the end, even more important than Napoleon, let's say, you'd probably say Charles Darwin. He put us on a path that we understand things. So I think sometimes science is not recognized and technology is not recognized at the moment it happens as being so consequential. But 50 years later, you know, somebody, you know, like Louis Pasteur, you know, who understands, you know, bacteria or somebody like Fleming, who invents the concept of modern day concept of vaccine, a sock and save them with the polio vaccine, they change our lives even more. So if you remember when you and I were at Time Magazine, whether it was the person of the year or the person of the century, I often shied away from the obvious politician. And we picked Andy Grove, for example, as a person of the year one year. David Ho. David Ho, who did the AIDS cocktail. But Andy Grove was a businessman and an engineer and a scientist who created Intel into the world's great corporation. And the creation of ever more powerful microchips changed our world a lot more than most political leaders do. So I always keep one eye to it. And that's why I picked Jennifer Doudna. She may not be the person of the century, 80 years from now, but people, somebody like her, who invents ways to edit our genes and fight off viruses, will say, well, that person had a bigger impact than even Donald Trump or Joseph Biden. I wanna quote you, you mentioned your last chapter and how you sum up the book and science in general. And you write, I now see the promise of CRISPR more than the peril. But as you look at our future, what gives you the greatest pause? The greatest pause? All of our technologies can be used for good or bad. It takes not only moral processing power, but social will to do it. We talked at the beginning of this discussion about Einstein. Now he comes up with a basic theory. And we all know it, E equals MC squared. And from basic science, you get many steps in between an atom bomb. Now he thought that that was going to be a technology that would help defy Hitler. That's why he writes a letter to Franklin Roosevelt, explaining how it could work. But after the bomb has dropped, he creates a union of concerned scientists and others to say, how do we put this genie back in the bottle? How do we stop the spread of nuclear weapons? And it took enormous will that we still each year have to exert to try to stop the proliferation of atomic weapons. Likewise, people in the digital revolution, they created all sorts of things. Amazon being one, mostly good, but there's a peril in what Amazon can do to Main Street, what it can do to business. Likewise, this Facebook and Twitter, they connect us. Let me tell you something, you know, it's better than I do because you study politics and democracy, there's a peril to what they can do. And so too with the life sciences technology for all the promise of anything from atomic power to connecting the world through social networks to creating new drugs and gene edits through the life sciences, there's an enormous promise, but it's only as good or as bad as we are. And it's only as good or as bad as we understand the technology and decide the uses of it. I want people to understand the promise of quicker and gene editing. I want them to understand and marvel at the simplicity and beauty of the science and the adventure that God is here, but that way they can understand better. All right, what's the peril that we're gonna also try to prevent? We wanna do it before the atom bomb has dropped, so to speak, or before we have elections that are hacked by social networks. Let's try to get this one where we understand it before we unleash it. Well, so let me talk about another scientific issue which represents an existential crisis which is global warming. Can, do we have the tools scientifically and do we have the will as a species to fend off global warming? Yeah, I think climate change has got to be addressed on multiple fronts and that includes technology. And I think we have to be open to a lot of technology. For example, I worry about climate change but some of the people I know on the far left have a deep disagreement with because I believe nuclear energy is something we have to develop into a safe source of energy. I look at what Bill Gates is doing with smaller nuclear plants and ones that don't have high pressure or water pressure so they can't explode that we purpose the material so we don't have the waste product. We're pretty good with technologies. We got to figure out ways to make nuclear better. Just down in Texas, you've had the debate over this but we have to have a lot better battery technology because every now and then we're gonna have cold snaps and wind storms and things where natural gas pipelines are gonna freeze and wind turbines aren't gonna be working quite as well. And so creating battery storage technologies are huge. Also just carbon capture is an important thing. We can figure out ways to do direct air capture of carbon but these I work with Halliburton Labs, a great Texas company with a great clean energy and new energy type lab. And Halliburton Labs is looking at everything from batteries and nuclear to whatever and keeping an open mind. That's what we have to do as well as of course all reducing our carbon footprint, all figuring out ways that solar and wind and renewables can be more of the mix but not getting ideological about it. It's like everything else in our society is why the Lyndon Johnson Library and what you all are doing is so important. We have to be more like the scientists in a way and say, let's not get into some ideological corner and start having strong opinions about solar energy or nuclear energy or gas mileage or everything else, just because it's ideological. Let's figure out all the things that could work. Let's innovate and let's not have knee jerk ideological reactions to everything. Then of course we can solve climate change. Walter, what will you turn your attention to next? What will your next book be about? I don't know, I really don't. This book is published this month in March. I always give myself five or six months to chew on things. They're really interesting people in the world today including Bill Gates we mentioned and Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos we mentioned. There are people in history that are interesting to me. You mentioned Madame Curie, not only wins a Nobel in chemistry but also in physics. So I think they're very interesting people. Louis Armstrong in my hometown of New Orleans, I've always wanted to crack the code there. But give me six months, Mark. How do you ultimately choose, Walter? What is that decision process look like? Oh, I throw a whole lot of things up in the air. I bore the heck out of my family and my family. Say, what do you think of this? And they'll say, and all of them said, Jennifer Doudna, who's she? And I said, let me do her, you'll find out. Jennifer Doudna will be a whole lot more famous despite the fact that she's already won the Nobel after this book, Walter. And it's a testament to your great credibility as an author. The book is the code breaker. Our guest is the great Walter Isaacson, my friend, Walter. Thank you so much for being here today. And thank you, Mark. And thank you for being my friend. Delighted to see you.