 Thank you everybody and thank you so much for being here. When we imagine that when we decided that the best way to commemorate produced 150th would be to try to build a continuous stream of brilliant and talented and knowledgeable people who would bring fresh ideas, the newest technology, the newest insights to us, we couldn't have done better than tonight's guest. Tonight's guest is, let me count the ways, an eminent journalist, an author, obviously a scholar, a media executive, a CEO at the Aspen Institute, an investment banker, and when he called upon he's been a public servant too. So there's a very long list of topics that we can ask him about and I'll ask some and then the last stretch as we often do you can ask questions at these two microphones. But let's get started please thank me, help me in thanking our guest tonight, Walter Isakson. Thank you very much, thank you for having me. Walter was teaching, he didn't need to do this. It's an incredibly gracious thing that he has shared this day with many of our students and now with you he was teaching yesterday at Tulane University. He'll be teaching tomorrow and so you'll understand why I'm so very grateful to him for making this time available. Walter your books, I'll bet everyone in the audience has read some if not all of them and in our audience including faculty and I hope many of our students either have or aspire to write books themselves. Would you just take a minute or two and talk about the process, the meticulous research that you do and how that may have changed over the decades in which you've been writing that bestseller after bestseller. Well one of the things I do is I tend to write narrative biographies which means there's a central character and it starts at the beginning and it goes to the end it's chronological and that makes it kind of simple because you know you're not having to make it a complex sort of formula etc. So what I do whether the person's alive as in the case of Steve Jobs or has been gone a long time like Leonardo is I start with the primary research the person's notes the person's memos if I can the interviews and I just put it all chronologically because one of the two things and we were talking about it in one of the classes here today two things happened to the study of history when I was a student and I don't take this wrong members of the academy but what happened was biography fell out of favor it was sort of oh we're telling the story through powerful people you know that was and said we had to have a people's history of everything I had a wonderful history teacher who has probably been on this page but back then her name was Doris Kearns she hadn't yet married Dick Goodwin and she was not tenured this shows how old I am and she taught me American history and for her dissertation in the first publication she wrote a biography Lyndon Johnson the American Dream and they didn't give her tenure because it was considered beneath the dignity of the academy to do so for a long time for 20 30 years until academics went back into the field of biography it was people like me David McCulloch on Meacham Doris Kearns Goodwin Bob Caro people who were not academics got to write narrative biography and to me it's good because the best I mean the Bible does it this way we tell our lessons through people and their stories and when I start a book I just say okay let's start with where this person was born and let's move and let's figure out how they learn because that's what happens when you do it chronologically somebody who's 20 there's a little bit less than when they're 30 and you show how they accumulate the creativity that allows them to be innovative have all the new tools digitization all the rest made the job easier more complicated no difference well it's made sometimes the historical research different there's a my first book which nobody remembers I did with a friend from college it's called the wise man it's about six friends in the 1940s yeah no you were not one but you should have been no no I remember yeah six friends in the 1940s three Democrats three Republicans who helped figure out our Cold War policy the Marshall Plan etc. sort of Harriman Atchison Bowe and that crap so Harriman and Atchison are actually and love it or all three banking partners mail was delivered twice a day back then so when love it and Harriman are in New York but Atchison's down in Washington they'd write twice it and you'd see okay tell me about this tell me about that technologically there's a moment in 1959 you can almost mark it we're direct long-distance dialing comes in and suddenly in the Brown Brothers Harriman archives where I went and was doing all these things the daily letters or twice a day letters stop and you just get call me about Vietnam you go darn we're losing the thread here because and likewise we're talking backstage you know Nixon and Lyndon Johnson and Kennedy take themselves but Nixon messed that up for the rest of us so you know so you lose those technological things but we gain things such as e-bails now that's going to be a trove someday I hope somebody other than the Russian intelligence services are keeping track of all of our emails maybe Google is keeping them for us because that will be how we write history in the future let's see if we can sell some books and let's do a little lightning round there maybe there probably will be questions about these later but just just a word or two about the the subjects of your books they'll take them in more or less the order you wrote them just sort of maybe a defining characteristic that that comes to mind so Ben Franklin so Ben Franklin was part of the greatest team ever made which is our founders and you had to have really people of grand stature like Washington you had to have really smart people like Madison and Jay or whatever you had to have very passionate people like John Adams and Sam Adams but if you're gonna make a team a leadership team you have to have the person who can bring them together cool them all down and say all right here's the common ground here's what we're going to do Franklin was that person he's a person that you and my mentor when I went to graduate school Dick Luger your mentor as well from here Dick Luger used to always teach this which was that compromisers may not make great heroes but they do make great democracies that was a line of Ben Franklin's and we've lost that today and Ben Franklin was sort of a glue that tried to hold us together was that a Pembroke College or where was we were at Pembroke yeah I was the co-chair with Dick Luger of the Pembroke Society which was as you would know as a college university president basically a fundraising group my job was introduced senator Luger and say and then afterwards say if you want to contribute to a poor college yeah well I omitted it from my my too short introduction of Walter but he is the living proof that Rhodes Scholars actually can't amount to something thank you yeah diamond doesn't who else went to Pembroke College stumped Pete Buttigieg oh well okay so he was on the Pembroke this is a very small college you go to Oxford on tour they show you Christ Church they show you modeling then they kind of walk by and say you've seen the rich and grand colleges and they will show you a poor little college well not poor in tradition as you just prove Dr. Johnson so then Einstein Einstein yeah when I did Ben Franklin you know we think of him as a doddering old dude flying a kite in the rain going you know those electricity experiments were phenomenally important and there the reason I loved writing about Franklin is they inform all that he does plus minus checks balances you know Newtonian mechanics but also the flow of electricity batteries all this you almost see in the Constitution these checks and balances and balances of power when he does his diplomacy he and his friend Thomas Jefferson would have thought you were a Philistine if you didn't know science and biology and Newton and stuff like that we lose that in about 1920 in history and it's partly because of Einstein suddenly Einstein comes along and you don't believe you can really grasp science and uncertainty principles and relativity and CP snow writes about the two cultures meaning those who love the humanities don't understand the sciences and I found that that was problematic because my father my grandfather were all engineers and scientists and so I wanted to try to demystify science and plus I just loved Einstein and the beauty the beauty of relativity as the coolest theory ever done and we one of our one of your predecessors at during this year of accelerated programming here it was a scientist who most recently proved the validity of the relativity theory oh with the bit what they did with the the Higgs boson or the gravity waves gravity waves so yeah I mean the thing I love about Einstein is once every two years there's going to be a headline saying Einstein proved wrong something goes fast in the speed of light or Einstein proved wrong this and I look at my watch and I say let's wait 48 hours then the next story comes out saying oh no they've discovered it was gravity waves and it is actually a force field and it doesn't travel fast in the speed of light and that's what that was it's not a poker full is it that that he was eager for people to try to disprove his theory that he wrote to some of it the board some of the other colleagues please do an experiment if you ever really want an intellectual in exercise and I tried to do it the Niels Bohr Albert Einstein dialogues both in person because they met three or four times a year at Solvay conference and their letters because what happens is Einstein in 1905 I mean they call it the miracle year and that's understating it he does relativity he does quantum theory he wins a Nobel for the electro magnetic way that falls into quantum theory and then at the very end he does an addendum after a summer of a equals mc squared basically comes out so he's got it all but the problem is relativity theory and quantum don't reconcile very well it's hard to have a unified theory that puts them together and the worst part about it to Einstein was that quantum theory left things at the subatomic level to chance that there was not a pure certainty or predictability or certainty in nature that's what Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is I'm saying just could not abide that God does not play dice or something like that yeah give the line yeah I cannot believe that God plays dice with the universe he says to deals bore the greatest comeback to that line finally after Einstein being Einstein said like 20 times it's driving bore nuts and there at a conference he fought up deals bore because it means you know I can't believe that things would happen by chance finally bore turns to Einstein and says Einstein please quit telling God what to do well in this confirmation bias era we're living in I frequently cite him to our students here's someone who wanted someone to contradict him or to disprove if they could and what it was eager to have his ideas some challenge and test I wrote about Leonardo and I'll soon we'll get to him but the thing that Leonardo Ben Franklin Einstein share is Leonardo's probably the first grand figure to understand the scientific method which is all right we've learned about the flood we've learned about the biblical flood the Renaissance is not they don't know they're in the middle of the beginning of the Renaissance so they don't know that they can be sacrilegious and he's looking at fossil levels and he's saying well wait let me test this out let me see how many layers are let me see when things were deposited and he uses the scientific method and keeps challenging people to disprove them and they often do and he changes his theory when things turn out to be wrong so does Ben Franklin and so does Einstein although Einstein he thought he was proven wrong truly only once which is he has the general theory of relativity and if you look at the general theory or if you're Einstein and you look at it maybe not me but it basically says this theory of general relativity can't have a stable universe if these equations are right the universe has to be expanding and we all knew the universe wasn't expanding you looked up it wasn't expanding so he finally puts in what he calls the cosmological constant which keeps the equations right the universe from expanding and then ten years later he's brought to the Hubble telescope and they have discovered that the universe is expanding and he said his greatest blunder was thinking that he had made a great blunder would we could all feel like that yeah well any more about Leonardo that will take him next well you know when we look at and I don't mean this to sound preachy but it's something I discovered as I was writing about and writing around here I was thinking about it too I walk campus why do certain places become cradles of creativity and obviously the greatest is Florence and 1470 when Leonardo rises a teenager 1770 when Philadelphia and Ben Franklin you know then there's a runaway the Bay Area of California in 1970 when Bill Gates and Steve Jobs all right and part of it is a you know we we talk about diversity as if it's you know we just run up the flagpole and salute it but we don't think about what it really means Leonardo da Vinci was illegitimate much to his delight because it meant he didn't have to be a notary like his father and grandfather but he was also a total misfit he was illegitimate he was left handed he was gay he was out and gay which in 1470 is pretty early he wore purple tunics he was distracted he you know he had all these quirks and so he comes from the small village like a lot of people might you know even today to go to the sophisticated city of Florence and they love the Medici family loves them they embrace him he becomes you know the boy wonder of the town and that moment all sorts of people coming into Florence Constantinople is just fallen so people come in from the Arab world bringing algebra which helps them be able to figure out oh perspective and Brunelleschi's building the dome using algebra and you have Gutenberg who couldn't get his printing shop working in in Germany well and so the print industry printing industry I mean Gutenberg's first shop is the year Leonardo's born so people coming in doing the printing industry in Florence so that intellectual ferment of different types of people in a cradle of some not only tolerance but amusement love respect causes Florence to be the place the Renaissance is born I think you may have just anticipated maybe answered one of my other questions but before I ask it Steve Jobs yeah well Steve was also a bit of a misfit adopted and learns that he was rejected by his first adopted family but he's somebody who stands at the intersection of the arts in the sciences after I did Franklin and Einstein I got a call from Steve Jobs I didn't know him real well but I'd met him before especially in 1983 when they bring the first Macintosh to Time Magazine I'm like the newest reporter there I'm the only guy at Time Magazine who has a computer who uses one so the old editors had to bring me upstairs to meet this guy because they needed one so after that Steve Jobs was my best friend twice a year whenever he had a new product out that he wanted good coverage in Time Magazine so at some point after I'd written these books I get a call from Steve and he says okay you did Franklin and Einstein do me next my reaction is the same as yours you arrogant little you know and I say well do you in 20 30 years when you retire then I find out from somebody a few days later hey I said why didn't know he had can't he said well he's keeping it secret but he called you the day after his diagnosis I said okay I'm gonna have to I want to do this but when he talked to me I said why did you want me to do it he said because every book you've written has been about somebody who stands at the intersection of the humanities and the sciences and he says and that's where creativity occurs that's what Franklin was that's what Einstein was and he said you about you're gonna end up doing Leonardo at some point that's why I thought of it because Vitruvian man is almost that symbol of the intersection of the humanities and sciences and if you ever saw one of Jobs' product launches the slide at the end would always be the street sign of the humanities and technology or the humanities and the sciences because he said that separates us from Microsoft and everything else we we have that in our DNA and so to me that was the essence of Steve Jobs a misfit and if you remember his famous ad when he comes back to Apple it's almost Leonardo-like it's here's to the misfits the rebels the round pegs in the square holes the ones who think different he goes on and the people are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do and so it's all part of that theme and I didn't quite realize I had a theme to my books until he told me well you just answered the question I was thinking you know we had for instance Ron Chernow here yeah you know Washington Hamilton you can see you tell you knew what he was what you what to expect in the category is yours until you just defined it for us I was gonna say you know what what's the theme of the pudding yeah and you know if you're an academic you know that it's important to have a specialty yeah but when I was growing up when I went to Time magazine for the first time it was a general interest magazine I can see people in the audience old enough to remember what that concept was all about and I was a floater as I said to your class earlier one week I'd look at the staff list I'd be in the music you know writing it next week I'd be writing medicine then math then foreign policy then you know theater and so I jumped around a lot and that was what Leonardo did he loved every he was the last person in history to try to learn everything you could possibly know about every subject that was knowable from anatomy to zoology to art you know to music and I think looking at those many diverse things in intersection it gives you a different view than the specialist so there are a lot of great historians of our circle meaning people I hang with me Jim Charnell as you said others McCullough most of them have a specialty you know presidential historian or in Charnell's case you know both in terms of American leaders like that I it probably would have been better if I had a specialty but I love to leap around talking right about everybody from a Steve Jobs to a Leonardo well we're glad you did I wanted to ask you because it one thing that's plainly common in these people is genius whatever that term is taking the mean I'm talk a little about the nature of genius you know I was reading particularly your your book about DaVinci got me thinking because in other places writing about other people genius has been people trying to pin this elusive quality down have said it it has to do with the ability to concentrate with great fixity on a goal and exclude other things in fact that may be why it borders up on you know the various things mental disorders or obsessive compulsive behavior things like that and there seem to be examples of people whose brilliance and breakthroughs came from that and yet I was I was really reluctant yeah I know I was reluctant to I think it I hope our students don't all read this book it is a 20 life lessons of DaVinci it's got things like procrastinate and get distracted you know yeah he has more unfinished paintings and pen finish painting so he's always putting things aside sort of a perfectionist well a couple things about genius first of all I don't think there's one particular formula secondly we think of genius as being really really smart there's students here here's what we forgot to tell you it ain't about being smart smart people are dime a dozen you've met a lot of them in various parts of your career they don't usually amount to much right it's creative people imagine it of people right who amount to something people can think different as Steve jobs would say Steve jobs I don't know if we're being recorded but I don't know if we care he was not nearly as smart or as you know mental processing as Bill Gates you'd watch the two of them Bill Gates is like Larry Summers smart but Bill Gates creates the zoom I don't know if anybody remembers the zoom but it was the MP3 it looked like it was made in Uzbekistan in a basement and Steve at the same time creates the iPod which looks gorgeous why because he was creative he was imaginative so to me that's an element of genius genius means thinking out of the box to me means being able to make a leap that's not just smart but creative and imaginative that often to me comes from seeing the patterns across different disciplines right before Einstein can get the theory of general relativity the most beautiful theory in the history of science he's totally stumped things aren't quite working he pulls out his violin every day and plays Mozart and says it connects him to the harmonies of the spheres and he eventually gets it Leonardo likewise can't do Saint Jerome in the wilderness and if you go to New York they brought it from the Vatican it's at the Met for the next couple of months but he ends up dissecting the human body until he can have an understanding of muscles and he goes back to work on it again so jumping from discipline to discipline tends to help the other thing I don't want your students to read and so close your ears here on this if you look at Leonardo and you look at Steve Jobs and you'll look at Ben Franklin and you look at Einstein well I said a little bit different where they have in common they all drop out of school this is why I don't get asked to do graduation speeches because they're rebellious yeah and it does help to be a bit rebellious now when I talk about that I've sometimes done that I think I saw it on maybe I'm repeating what I said up there because I saw they were using so little loops but one of those speeches I talked about this with Einstein and how he was always thinking out of the box I mean other people were trying to feel why is the speed of light always constant I mean it's if you're going towards the source that you come at you faster and he finally makes this leap that okay speed of light is always constant but time is relative depending on your state of motion well that's a hugely creative leap so somebody comes up to me after the audience of one of these things is the Miami Book Fair I think I was looking at the corner says hey I'm just like Einstein look at this person I go oh yeah so why it says he he says because I think out of the box I said yeah but he knew what was in the box before he thought out of it don't try this at home yeah you know it's not the detour but I thought it was so sadly ironic that Steve Jobs eschewed modern science with regard to his illness he could have if he'd stayed in if he stayed in the box medically instead of what spending a lot of time on on let's say unproven approaches we might still have him or would have had him longer we'd have had him longer it wasn't just that one of the things you talk about on geniuses is persistence and for Steve it was a reality distortion field is what the people who work with him called it meaning Steve would something would be impossible Steve say no we're gonna walk through that wall or whatever and you know whether it was shaving 20 seconds on the boot up time of the original Mac or making a perfect piece of glass he would stare at people and say don't be afraid you can do it unblinking because he had a guru in India taught him how to do that so and they kept saying it was a reality distortion and then half the time he got it to work the Mac boots up faster than you know an IBM PC the iPhone is an amazing piece of art but the reality distortion field did not work on cancer and he kept just denying it just saying well I'm not going to deal with it it will go away if I eat as one of his Bill Campbell said excuse my language you know horse shit and the horse shit roots or something I mean I'm sorry I bumbled the words because I don't want to say them but they were really furious because he was just eating all these weird organic things you have from play at time to time cautioned and as I more people should people looking at history today against superimposing today's morality and today's codes on time is long gone the wonderful the thing to think about is a history professor and my views on it evolve some I call it the Jefferson conundrum and meet him and I talk about it a lot because our views on Thomas Jefferson have evolved somewhat however you don't throw out you know you got two buckets one is we hold these truths and the other is all men are created equal he kind of messes up the second but he's got the first down pat and you got to be able to take a person as a whole and that was an interesting thing about the jobs book even because he was a real jerk they have a technical term in Silicon Valley for that begins with an a but you know but you have to say okay you take the good with the bad and I'll let you do the thought experiment but I first wrestled with it in real seriousness with Kissinger obviously because I think he was a true genius and thinking out of the box and doing the triangular balance that helps us get out of Vietnam but obviously he had a lack of moral sentiment as he would say in the conduct of foreign policy but I particularly wrestled with it publicly in New Orleans when I came back a few years ago and I was asked by Mitch Landrieu your namesake as Mitch it was a mayor to be co-chair of our tricentennial and the other co-chair was mitten Marsalis the cornattice and trumpeter of jazz at Lincoln Center so went and calls me up says I'll do it if you do it and I said sure he said but one condition I said what and he said you helped me convince Mitch to take down Robert E. Lee now Lee was in Lee's circle right at the end of St. Charles Avenue and I said to went and I said yeah to your mind you know it's you know everybody knows that statue I said I've driven around that statue thousands of times I never pause to think about who's on top of that plinth long pause he says I do I said okay let me think about this differently a little bit so Robert E. Lee is somebody who had been he as President Trump has said you know many strong great qualities but also was on the wrong side of history I can see why the money was put up it was actually I mean Lee never had anything to do with New Orleans the Army of Northern Virginia wasn't down there you know in New Orleans smartly or dumbly had surrendered on day two of the war and so General Butler occupied us the whole time and but so he was just put up in the 1890s after Plessy v. Ferguson after reconstruction to sort of be a symbol of whatever and so I said all right it's time now it's been a century it was okay to have them up for a century he doesn't have to be up for another two or three centuries we have to reevaluate in the light of the current day without being too much guilty of presentism who do we want to have on our pedestals yeah and I think we have to understand say Jefferson in his time but you also have to put him in the context a context in which a lot of people there kept slaves especially the Virginia presidents but others freed the slaves when he didn't they didn't and secondly Ben Franklin had two slaves and was so close to Jefferson and then realize Franklin did he kept a chart Franklin of all the arrows he had made a water during his life and then how he had rectified it and the greater water he had made was once when he was young having two household slaves so he becomes the founder of the society for the abolition of slavery as his way of rectifying it well in history as a historian without being guilty of presentism you can say here's where the Ark of history went these people are on the right side and these people got it wrong and so I think we have to apply some moral judgment but like everything like Ben Franklin teaches us it's a balance you don't go off the deep end on either way well I just I think that you have just reflected what I think I have to be the two preconditions to reaching such a judgment today one is actual historical knowledge and I see a lot of people you know condemning this and that with clearly don't want don't know the history and then and the complexities and the nuances and then you know a sense of empathy that you have to have a sense of empathy you also have to have a sense of understanding and you have to avoid what we have too much of today which is absolute knee jerk for now you know that you're telling me that what I call 140 character problem which is your I got to do a tweet I know I'm right I'm gonna blast things I make my history students at Tulane you probably don't have as much of it here because you're but you know we're down south find a building at Tulane and make the argument for and against taking the name off or whatever whether it's Eddie a bear who you probably remember vaguely he was a cop but one of the interesting ones is Edward B. White Supreme Court Justice Chief Justice of the United States from Louisiana and he's in front of the Louisiana Supreme Court where you've been Supreme Court Justice Louisiana and then goes on to become in the United States he votes on what we will now say is without doubt the wrong side of Plessy v. Ferguson and so everybody says we got to take down the statue well the statue is there because not because of his vote on Plessy but because of been head of Louisiana Supreme Court I said and by the way I want you to read his decision in US I mean the United States versus US Steel where he breaks up the trust and he says that huge monopolies and trust crush the ability of the common man to have good jobs and good wages and I want you to understand the fullness of his life and say okay he was wrong on Plessy but he was very progressive when it came to something our job is sometimes is to complexify meaning hey it's more complex yeah takes a hundred and forty five characters yeah exactly yeah I want to spend just a few quick minutes it's you you're so unusual in so many ways but but as the editor of Time Magazine and I think I saw somewhere in their first fledgling digital you were part of their first digital venture whatever that amount to you were also the CEO and chairman of CNN so you're one of those people who has lived through and incredibly in such a swift transformation in the way we receive our our information print electronic and digital you know what's that what's that right been like I ran Time Magazine in the 90s when we were making huge sums of money and the internet comes along and new companies like petfood.com are like taking spread you know two-page ads in the magazine and soon as I leave you know print journalism goes down the tank because the internet makes everything for free at least in the 90s and 2000 it was interesting because I'll give the broad brush answer the good side and the bad side was that in our I'll speak almost to this whole auditorium day in generation which means from the end of World War two to 2000 there was an anomaly which was big mainstream press in Ben Franklin's day there were like 5,000 people in Philadelphia and there were 14 newspapers but when we were growing up there were three networks let's say three news magazines three national newspapers whatever and there were gatekeepers who could sort of say well that's not fair to a Mitch Daniel or that's not you know and we weren't totally right there were biases but there was just a general sense partly in economic sense that if there are three news magazines or three networks you got to get a more than a third of the viewership or audience if you're going to succeed but when it gets to narrow casting when they're now 500 cable channels and 500 talk radio you know stations and a thousand blogs and bloggers fears and internet publication you just got to get 1% of the audience and so you have to go for a more passionate and that means more ideological thing so I was there once we were trying to hold the center at CNN and I finally left because I knew the center wasn't going to hold that cable you had to become ideological to get your core audience and so I think the business model of journalism sort of collapsed at that point and it wasn't evil insidious journalists doing it it was almost the technology and the fate of having thousands of channels and things like that I feel that there is still room in our society for what I would call the common ground what I hope I mean Time Magazine you may think it was mainstream media it was liberal but no it was run by Henry Lewis and Claire Booth Lewis both Claire Booth Lewis a very conservative Republican Henry Lewis a Republican and it was considered sort of in the center then it was for Wendell Wilkie that type of thing it was an enormous force in both the White Houses where I worked and especially in the first one that the a key question every Friday is what are the what are time and Newsweek and sometimes US news going to put on their cover this weekend there'd be an advanced copy as I recall on Sunday or Saturday or Saturday Saturday you'd get the advanced copy with the press list we'd have it yeah that would absolutely dictate what the Sunday talk shows we're going to concentrate on and that would dictate Monday's headlines and it would dictate Monday's water cooler if I could call it yeah you go to work you're hanging around and everybody has a common set of information if you go to the water cooler you go to the talk shows whatever there's no common information somebody has been watching Sean Hannity gets a water cooler and somebody's been watching Rachel Maddow over the weekend they don't even share the same set of facts and yeah you know and as Moynihan used to say you're entitled to your own opinion but not your own fact that's what we now have in the media and time and Newsweek and I think the others tried to have that common ground where you check the fact I was telling the class early I can tell you the hour that that ended I was editor of time the Monica Lewinsky affair broke 1990 something or other Newsweek was ahead of us on it you can always tell what your rival is doing you interview so yeah the people in Newsweek just came in boy they actually know three other people who've heard that you know and you go my god we're behind Newsweek I'm throwing every reporter we have to try to get that story whatever Bill Clinton did you know it's Saturday it comes around to be late Friday night in early Saturday morning and I got all my editors there and I say we can't run the story we don't have it we have nobody on the record people say oh but Newsweek's got it we're gonna look silly Newsweek's gonna beat us I said yeah but I can't run the story we don't have nailed I'll wait for that moment when the magazines come as I said and Newsweek doesn't run it the editor in charge then was Evan Thomas who had been with me at time and was my co-author and the wise man so I was like personal rival so I pick up the phone call Evan say what happened he said we held it we just couldn't pin it down go to sleep five the next morning the phone rings it's a news desk have you seen the drudge report and the drudge had put the entire Newsweek killed story on and that's when we no longer had the power to say this story is not nailed down yet because you knew it would run somewhere no I don't want to these subject to foguism but it's very very hard to believe that the net we've all the gains that have come that the net is not negative when when there are not flinty eyed editors like you insisting on quality control and on on sources and all the invitation if you were gonna ban foguism so I'm gonna agree with you and as I said to your class it's not just that I mean it used to be I still remember 9-11 being in the newsroom with Ted Turner at CNN you know when I was right and said okay we can't put out what this is until we totally nail it down get this is bigger than anything else meaning we can't get this one wrong so nowadays the fact that you don't try to get it right you just try to get it out there and then you correct it is bad but the other thing that's bad is social media meaning Facebook Twitter that sort of thing is both anonymous you can trace back who really sent you something or who made something up and it incents by its algorithm right it incents engagement and arrangement and if something gets shared a lot it goes to the top of the feed in Twitter or Facebook and what gets shared is not well there's a complex call on what you should do with gun can it's can you believe what Hillary Clinton did to this cat or something so I think social media and the and the lack of controls on the internet the line of the goodness that came from that because frankly it was kind of bad with flinty old you know say it old editors controlling what you got to hear it was kind of good that the monopoly of the that's the way it is crime kites got broken but then it just got too broken in the lines of now crossed I'm gonna ask a walter one more question which is your notice to come to the mics if if you have questions of your own this will give you just a couple minutes to do that so please take advantage something completely different one of the public services to which he's been called this these have included you know the Board of Broadcasting Governors and national appointments president Obama appointed you I think to that but in your hometown of New Orleans after the unforgettable tragedy of Katrina many years ago now you were helped lead the reconstruction the recovery authority and I'm just curious about that tell us about your hometown now and I want to ask it in the context of a book that always stuck with me Mansur also wrote a book in which he attempted to demonstrate that the fastest growing and sometimes most creative and successful societies followed a cataclysm of some kind San Francisco fire massive defeat in war Germany Japan post World War two things like that and a lot of evidence for that that these sweep away encumbrances to change and new ideas that any society builds up incumbent you know institutions have you seen any of that in New Orleans or is it going totally and it's I don't want to say it in a way that sounds callous because storm was horrible right but you had to make sure that we didn't screw it up and our first decision was we're not going to try to rebuild the city the way it was we're going to rebuild it the way it should have been that doesn't mean sweeping away all the old because part of what New Orleans is is 300 years of history in the first so it's preserving what's good but the school system let's just take one example you can pick anything you want but schools was one of the ones I did was all right it was a really bad school system we have this one chance what we did and this was before everything became politicized we decided that one reason school systems are bad is their monopolies no you know if a whole food moves in next to a safe way and it's got a salad bar those safe ways gotta up its game and you got competition schools don't have competition so we out of the hundred and two schools in New Orleans decided and it is still this way that it's all charter now if you sort of have half charters or one third Charter but they can't skim the cream there's a common app charter schools have to take parents get one of their top three choices if parents aren't choosing your school you don't have students if your students dwindle it's like Purdue people choose Indiana now that they wouldn't or Vanderbilt never but good point but bad choice yeah you all play in Vanderbilt soon I think but but you know if you screw up here parents and kids don't choose you so we have a system of choice in which people apply they got their top three choices generally I mean there's a few exceptions you have to take special ed you can't skim the cream but you had competition so the first thing that happens is in my neighborhood of Broadmoor right in the heart of the city part of the central city neighborhood I grew up and moved back to there were three schools and one of them for change said okay we're gonna stay up until 6 p.m. why because it's idiotic to throw a kid out in the street especially in New Orleans at three in the afternoon so when it stayed open till six the other two schools is like the safe way saying we're gonna stay open till midnight so they both did many even little things Alice waters came from San Francisco and one of the schools and planted a garden and that and so the school had a garden where they grew their own vessels and cook them the other two schools and neighborhoods have to follow suit they've got to compete so now we have a school system the charter bit is not that important that's become a loaded word but it's all parental choice where and you have autonomy at each school to decide the length of the day it's complicated you have to have make sure we have standardized tests so we can compare the schools but so we tried to reinvent something new and now the New Orleans school system was the worst in Louisiana now it's graduating more than any other parish in Louisiana it this test scores have gone from you know like in the 30 percentile up to the 70 percentile now I mean that's just one thing but another thing that's happening across America it's not just New Orleans but you're happening here good creative towns have become magnets for talent and you see that in Chattanooga you see it in Nashville you know you see it here until we have to figure out how do we stay a magnet for talent thank you I think we've got a question I'll give the usual admonition questions not speeches I get to do this and please identify yourself my name is Mason Wiss and I'm Mason I had some questions about your writing about Henry Kissinger and you have to remember I was about your age when I wrote that book so you have to remind me I'll some of some of it you any harsh criticisms but I do have some questions you I read what I could of it after I heard that you were coming yeah I wasn't able to finish it I was able to read excerpts though and through what I read and interviews I was able to watch a view around when the book came out I never saw you call Henry Kissinger a war criminal and I never saw you accuse him of genocide and I was wondering if you right that's right it was an attempt to avoid presentism as you were talking about today and bias and if you think that in avoiding those adjectives you achieve well no I would have used the adjective if I felt he was a war criminal and I looked at chili part of the book nobody reads I looked at the secret bombing of Cambodia and looked at what you know what happened and I am deeply deeply critical of what went on there I don't think that it's particularly enlightening when you slap a label now I've slapped labels occasionally now I even slapped the label racist which is up there with war criminal not on Henry Kissinger but but I'm pretty careful when I write not to let labels distract you rather than have you learn exactly what happened with the bombing of Cambodia now the genocide that you might talk about was as you know Paul Pot and the Khmer Rouge doing it in Cambodia to Cambodia and it was part sorry there's also the genocide in East Timor committed by the Indonesians which right and both of them were not done by America but you could argue correctly perhaps that the consequences say of the secret invasion of Cambodia led to the rise of Paul Pot which led to the genocide likewise in East Timor you could argue that even though the American didn't do it American actions were deeply mistaken and led to horrible consequences and if you want to make that argument my books the best place to do it because that's the argument I make but that doesn't mean I slapped the label war criminal for having done the invasion of Cambodia even though it led to really bad consequences and so did East Timor you're right generally and requires intent and bad judgment is something short of intent right and war criminals are very specific term of art I mean there's a whole literature on what constitutes a war crime and you can make an argument that in an unintended consequences of what he did that would still rise to the level of war crime but that's where you don't find that in my book because I don't actually believe that thank you Mason. That was a good question. Let's go over here. Hi. A few years ago Jeff Bezos purchased the Washington Post last year. Mark Benioff purchased your former employer. I'm just interested what your thoughts are on these technology oligarchs. Well I this is nothing new I mean all sorts of wealthy people in the past have bought you know I mean newspapers and outlets because they you know but it's something that's we've had a resurgence of it. I couldn't figure out 10 years ago what's a business model going to be for journalism because it's advertising's not working in the age of the internet subscriptions are not working when everybody thinks all content's supposed to be free. I never came up with the notion of egotistical billionaires buying it for their own reason but that's a brilliant solution especially if it's a Benioff who I actually like a whole lot and a Bezos who seems to leave aside his personal life at the moment seems like he's not doing it for insidious reasons. There are times when the billionaire egotist who buys it can be a problem. I mean I grew up with Marty Peretz owning the New Republic and you could argue that one either way Murdoch owning Fox etc but benign billionaires is a good business model and I remember when time was going on and people said what's gonna happen with time you know and time ink is collapse whatever they called me they said find me a billionaire and I went around I talked to David Rubin signed you probably know half the people I talked to said hey don't you want to own a news magazine you can get it pretty cheap and you finally got the Benioff and like bingo yay thank you great question let's let's move quickly we only got a little bit of time this is a question that you mentioned about the New Orleans public school system do you worry that a school system will have the same pressures to narrow cast just like cable news channels yeah every year we have to refine how it works in the school system and one of the things you have to do is say you can't skim the cream you can't just pick and choose who gets to come to school is done by lottery but if people aren't wanting to come to your school you're gonna end up shutting down because you don't have enough people coming but things happen like their school the Brico large school which teaches in French all right is that how good is that how bad is that we try to make sure they're racially balanced in some ways if you're totally racially imbalanced either way we say you know we're not trying to have quotas or anything but maybe not doing something right here also I'll give you one example it's not quite up what you said which is a friend of mine Ben Markovich did collegiate Academy it was wonderful it was in a FEMA trailer for a while but it's still the best school some of the kids I mentored I made them go to collegiate one of them's at Yale now but he suspended kids they had to walk along the line they had to wear a uniform they had to and if you did something wrong twice or whatever you were suspended and it got to be pretty bad and somebody was writing an article saying hey they're just suspending more people in the other school and Ben called me up said can you get on the stop that article I said well let's look at it and I said well wait that article is true I'm not gonna get him to stop it and I said he said well we have to suspend people because if they're troublemakers it ruins the whole school I said what good are you doing putting a kid on the street at 11am because they didn't want them I said why don't you make a pledge next year no suspensions he said well how we do that so we'll raise money we got Mike Bloomberg to his foundation to pay for it to have an in-house place a suspension room with counselors and all there so there's a lot of things that go wrong when you allow school autonomy and choice and each year I mean I just came from a meeting on Monday of new schools New Orleans and we have 12 other problems like that but but it's still worth the effort because we didn't need to go back to the school system we had before the storm go here hello so this is just a quick question because you brought up an excellent point when you you brought up an excellent point when you brought up the Hannity versus Matto example because sometimes yeah it is difficult to go through the news without getting agenda after agenda so my question would be when you're going through a particular piece looking for facts especially for I speak for everyone who academic curriculum requires this what kind of facts are you trying to keep your eyes out for and how do you know if something is fact versus agenda you know I think we're all smart enough that with a good smell test that you know it's sometimes hard on the internet I was watching some video that had gone viral where somebody had thrown something in the car when I said you know what and it was another one I saw with a basketball player got beaten by a girl said those are two fake stage videos I know that they're just a rile people up on the internet but it's you know I can pull out my phone and show you you know here's my news diet in any given late night I tend to do it at midnight before I go to sleep it's a Wall Street Journal New York Times Washington Post you know sort of the mainstream but it's Vox and do the Daily Caller as well as the Huffington Post you know try to get both sides but as I look at a fact I've triangulated it enough I've read four or five different sources even on complex things like Boris Johnson deciding to expel Winston Churchill's grandchild from the Conservative Party which I find rather amusing you know I'm like alright let me drill down on this let me see with the Telegraph which is a more Tory-oriented paper in England I've already read the Daily Mail and I've read New York Times on it so I think you do what you do in life you're sitting there at dinner at the dining room table here and somebody tells you something every now and then you're gonna check hey that really happened and even people who try to tell the truth Brian Williams I don't think meant to lie but you or Joe Biden for that matter I don't think meant to mix up the stories he did in New Hampshire intentionally but people get things wrong you have to be non-judgmental you have to say you know people just get things wrong but let me let me check it thank you we're over time I'm sorry I'll take one more question and I'm happy to stay if you want for now you got to be in class tomorrow all right I'll do it real quick in fact if you want to let three questions hit me and then I'll have picked the one that I most want to answer that way I'll only answer one I'm the one eating up the time hi so you mentioned the idea of kind of thinking outside the box and the scientific method which one of the biggest promises is to not take assumptions and not take things as is what do you think is the best way that you've seen among the research that you've done that people build that type of mindset because I think it's one that doesn't at least I've seen in many people doesn't come naturally so how do you really get the mindset of not taking things as is and really thinking deep into them next question to I'm gonna actually take all three hi my name is Rajiv so I really like your book on called innovators it's like you study the group of hackers and talk about the digital revolution it's like you've seen you've studied a lot of history and seen the revolution of this like the digital revolution so where do you think with AI and space travel where do you think the future is headed and then what's your thoughts on Elon Musk or the AI and the really big debate on AI with good evening so among these men who stand at the intersection of sciences and humanities would you say with your references social media that that Mark Zuckerberg is among them is here to be qualified to be one of these geniuses to use your words okay I'm gonna do it real quick in reverse order no on Mark Zuckerberg he should be better he should have stayed and studied more of the humanities courses he shouldn't have dropped out had he had a good sense of the humanities he would not be making Facebook the insidious force it now is in our society well said thank you yeah and I don't think he's a bad person I just think that he doesn't get it the way Steve Jobs did and others on AI and other things here's the key stand at this intersection machines are not gonna replace us the history of the digital revolution starting with Ada Lovelace is the combination of human creativity with machine processing power there are people like Elon who think the machine processing power someday gets so great it won't need our creativity anymore but if you look at the line for the past 130 years it's the people who have done the interface between humans and machines i.e. the apple iPhone whatever that's where the power has lain is with those who believe the connection of humans to their machines will be better than machines that go without humans and as to your question there's just a simple answer you have to be a little bit rebellious I made fun the fact that Steve Jobs drops out of school Ben Franklin runs away Einstein you know Leonardo all that they're all a bit rebellious they're willing to question authority this is not something you should do every day at Purdue but every now and then when somebody says you know the speed of light is always constant it moves to an ether and time says like Newton does the first sentence of the Principia time marches along second by second irrespective of how we observe it and you got a patent clerk Einstein who can't get a job so he's a third-class clerk in a patent office he's looking at the first sentence of the greatest you know piece of science ever written up until then time marches along second by second irrespective of how we observe it he says how do we know that how would we test that how would we test that if two people are moving really fast would they see the time the same way nobody thought of questioning the premise upon which Newton it started the Principia but this patent clerk thinks different thank you I was I was gonna take responsibility but if you're late to class tomorrow it's on you now so you know I don't know about you too late it doesn't begin my class is still noon it's like a senator Magnus and used to say that meaning doesn't start till I get there right thank you all for coming you know the term that's drifted out of use generally renaissance man but the species is clearly not extinct because there's at least one extent in our time and you just heard from me so thank you