
Burmese: 
Burmese
Burmese
myanmar

English: 
- [Sal] It's always fun to talk to you.
I know the team here are
super excited about it.
I mean, there's like 10 different things
we can talk about with you.
I'll start with, kind of, who
you are and your background
just to get everyone on the same page.
You're fundamentally a writer.
Right when you came out
of college, you went
to be a writer in London,
then in New Orleans,
which is where both of us grew up.
What was it early on in your
life that kind of convinced you
that you wanted to be a
writer, that this was something
that you would kind of find meaning in?
- Sal and I both grew up in
New Orleans, and I had a,
sort of an uncle in New
Orleans, my uncle by marriage.
But we never knew what Uncle Walker did,
because he was always
at home drinking bourbon
and eating hog's head cheese,
north of Lake Pontchartrain,
on the Bogue Falaya,
and we'd say, "Ann,
what does your dad do?"
And he'd say, "Well, he's a writer."
And I was like nine or 10 years old.

English: 
And it was only after, I
think I was age 11 or so,
The Moviegoer comes out by Walker Percy,
and he's a great, or was
a great Southern novelist.
And I realized that being
a writer was something
you could do, just like being
an engineer or fisherman,
or doctor, or whatever.
And like, you could actually be a writer,
and you got to sit home
all day and drink bourbon,
which seemed an upside
to the whole writing gig.
And so I would, you know,
grill Walker Percy and say,
"Tell me about it, how do
you do this?" or whatever.
And then I read his novel, by
that point he'd come out with
The Last Gentleman as well.
I read them carefully,
and they always were about
faith and growth.
- This is when you were in high school?
- Yeah, it's when I
was about 14 years old.
- So you were able to
track him down and...
- Well (mumbles) so we would
go fishing on the boat.
You know the Bogue Falaya
right near Covington?
And we had a place up there, our family,

English: 
and the Percy's did, and we
were all kind of related.
So, we'd go waterskiing.
His daughter, Ann, was my
age, and we would waterski
the Bogue Falaya and capture
turtles and do whatever
you did when you were 14 years old.
Try to flirt with Ann, but we
didn't know how to flirt well,
but we could catch turtles well.
Then, you know, we'd get home, and I'd...
Or get to their house,
and I'd say, you know,
"Tell me about this thing."
And I asked him about the novels and the
themes and the philosophical
themes and the preacher,
and he said, "Look, here
are two types of people
"come out of Louisiana.
"Preachers and storytellers."
He said, " For God's
sake, be a storyteller.
"The world's got far too many preachers."
And so I realized that
storytelling was sort of a way
that you could make sense of the world.
You know, make people
understand things better.
And I said, "Well,
that's what I want to do.
"I want to be a writer,
and I don't want to be
"an opinion writer, I want
to be a storyteller writer."
- And did you have doubt?
I know you were a teenager now.

English: 
Did people tell you that,
hey, it's hard to be a writer?
Is this kind of a, be a doctor...?
- Well, I had, I mean it wasn't
like, okay I'm a teenager.
I'm going to be a writer.
I mean, I was a teenager
and then I went to college.
And I actually studied
philosophy in college,
and then went to graduate
school and studied philosophy.
So, there was a moment, I
thought I might be a philosopher,
although I didn't quite
know, whether, I don't know,
in this strip here, whether
somebody says, you know,
philosopher and you go in and they...
I didn't quite know how
you become a philosopher.
But I was actually thinking of, you know,
being an academic and even
showed my undergraduate
professors the thesis I
had written in England.
And they said, "No, you'd
probably be better off
"being a journalist."
And so, it was at that point that I joined
the Sunday Times of
London, and what is now
The Times-Picayune of New Orleans.
- What was it that first, and
Walter's extremely humble.
To go from, not a lot of
kids go from Louisiana
to Harvard to Rhodes Scholar.
- You did, sort of.
- I didn't do the last part.
- You did MIT.

English: 
- Wait, wait, but the...
- We're not that much of a backwater.
- Yes, that's right.
- A lot of people go...
- That's right.
- Okay.
- Ellen Degeneres went to my high school.
- Really?
- Yeah.
- Did she go to Harvard?
- I don't think so.
- Okay.
- That's um...
- Grace King High School.
- I know what your high school was.
- You went to...
- Newman.
- The fancy school,
where, anyway...
- Me and Michael Lewis.
- Fewer people from Grace
King go to, anyway..
- I love it when you and I are doing
competition on our humble roots.
(audience laughs)
- Ain't gonna work.
- Yes, I didn't do a
lot of turtle catching.
- Yeah, yeah.
- You're kind of a young
adult at this point.
You graduated from...
How do you find that first experience?
You know, there's kind
of this romantic notion
of being a writer, and
when you're in college
and you're doing your thesis,
you're doing philosophy.
But then there's this kind
of real world of kind of
being on the beat and
writing stories about
the local whatever it might be.

English: 
Was that a disappointment,
was it exciting?
Was it a mix?
- You know, I loved it.
I started off...
At the Picayune, but I had
gotten a summer internship
at The Washington Post.
It was the summer of Watergate, right?
And it was just '74, all about to break,
Nixon was going to resign.
And either foolishly or
not, I decided not to do it.
And I worked for T. Smith
and Sons, the stevedores
on the Mississippi River.
You know, the Napolean
Avenue wharves and stuff,
because I wanted to write
and novel about the river.
So, I decided I should work the river like
Mark Twain did or something.
And so I missed all of Watergate.
I still have the novel I wrote that summer
that's excruciatingly bad.
It's about the river and
all that sort of thing.
And I realized, gee, I
will never be a novelist.
And then went into journalism.
- [Sal] So you actually,
you were on a boat?
- Well these are called derrick
barges, you know if you look
at the wharves, and there's
these flatbed barges,

English: 
but they have a crane
on them, and they get
pushed around by what looked
like tug boats, we call them
push boats, because
they actually, you know,
they don't tug the thing,
they push the thing.
And they go up and down
the river in very lazy way.
Incredibly hot, because these things
had creosote metal,
and you'd have to put the
creosote on the metal.
You'd have to wear very thick soled shoes,
because the deck got so hot
that it would burn your feet.
And the other thing I
remember, which I loved,
was every time the barge
started up, you know,
the crane started up, the
electricity would go back on.
And we had a coffee
percolator, and so it would
re-percolate the coffee all
day, until it was almost
the consistency of the creosote.
And I loved that really strong coffee.
- And so you were working on it?
And you said, can I work
here and also write?
- Yeah, 'cause you...
I mean, I don't want
to sound too romantic.
It was also an incredibly
high payed job, at that time.

English: 
The port in the early '70's was booming,
the extraction industries:
oil, natural gas, sulphur,
were going really well.
I don't know why, but I
mean, it was the '70s.
And so you could make, I
don't remember the dollars,
but you could also make
double time and then
two and a half times if you
worked Sundays or overtime.
And so, I just made enough
to last me through college.
So, it was partly for the
money and partly for the
romanticism of writing a novel.
And yeah, you couldn't sit
there on the derrick barge
and type a novel, but you'd
sort of meet all the people
on all the boats coming up and down
in those unloaded boats, you'd go in...
So I'd gather stories
and at night, I'd go home
and write it up, and it was really bad.
- (laughs) I mean, you joke
about it now, but obviously,
this was something you cared deeply about,
this idea of being a writer,
this idea of being a novelist.
I mean, what was, I guess,
one, what made you think
that this wasn't cut
out for you, but also,
what allowed you to not
give up writing altogether?

English: 
- Well, I actually liked
nonfiction, too.
I mean, to be able to tell...
And when I started
working for the Picayune,
I was on police beat.
And you'd get these
wonderful, wacky stories.
I mean Jim Garrison was trying Clay Shaw
for the murder of President Kennedy.
I mean, I don't know if
you remember (mumbles).
- One of Jim Garrison's
best friends was my
AP American History teacher's father.
- Oh.
- So that's all that...
- That makes you really close...
- To that story.
That's what we did in AP American History.
- Can we go to the white
board and graph that out?
- He's kind of, yeah.
Well, I don't know, my...
Friend's, my teacher's
father in law, anyway.
There's a...
- So, there are all these
wacky people, including Jim
Garrison, who was followed by
Harry Connick, whose son is
the cornet and trumpet player.
So, there are all these
wonderful tales in New Orleans,
and there was a rush...
I don't quite know what it
is, but there's a rush which,

English: 
every day almost, I would have a story.
And often on the front
page, 'cause if you're
covering crime, you get on the front page.
And there you were,
you'd tell these stories,
and your name would be in the paper.
And so, it wasn't like I
was lamenting the fact that
I hadn't yet written the
great American novel or
the great novel about the river.
I kept thinking I would,
and then eventually,
after I wrote my first
book or two, I showed it,
an updated version of the
novel to my agent, who...
Was not in any way
encouraging, and said...
- But they liked your biography.
- Right, well they liked, the
nonfiction was doing well.
And you know, in some ways, if you take
Steve Jobs and you take this book,
I write narratives.
I mean, I don't write...
Analytical nonfiction.
So these are stories, and I
tell you, if you wrote a novel
that was word for word
that Steve Jobs book,

English: 
people would say, "Well that's
not, you know, credible.
"It doesn't feel like it
could possibly be true,
therefore it's not a good novel."
But in some ways, with a piece
of narrative nonfiction,
you know, you can try to
make into the same type
of tale a novel would be.
Now, obviously, I consider people who are
truly creative novelists
to be in a quantum orbit
you know, above ours.
I was once going to a writers conference,
and Betsy, my daughter I
think you may have met,
said, "Dad, why are you
going to a writers...?"
I said, "Well, cause you know, I'm a..."
And she says, "Well Dad,
you're not a real writer.
"You write nonfiction."
And so, we know it's not quite the same,
but I do think, if you're telling a tale,
and you try to make it a
storytelling type thing,
meaning chronological
narrative, you can have that
excitement of watching
people grow, ideas forming,
one thing leading to another.
- And so you, with that in
mind, you have this kind of

English: 
parallel life, or maybe
it's not so parallel.
The Times-Picayune, you started
working for Time Magazine,
which is kind of the big piece
of your career, Time Magazine.
Eventually, you're the editor-in-chief.
But at the same time,
you're this biographer,
and you kind of take on these
larger than life characters,
Franklin, Einstein, Jobs.
Were those two different jobs
that you had in your head,
or were they the similar
type of role, writing for
Times Magazine, eventually
becoming editor-in-chief.
- Well, when I started at Time,
I did it with a friend who I'd
gone to college with, a guy
named Evan Thomas, who
you may have heard of.
And we were frustrated,
because at Time Magazine,
this is in a previous
century, let me remind you.
There was no website, you
didn't have to tweet everyday.
You came out once a week,
usually, with two pages you write.
So, it wasn't the hardest job
and the heaviest lifting,
you know, in America.

English: 
And, in fact, it was boring at times.
Like, Monday, Tuesday,
Wednesday, you're sitting around
trying to figure out what
am I supposed to be doing.
And then you got frustrated,
because you'd go out,
and you'd report the story,
and you had to keep it
to what would we say, 2,000 words.
And so, I was covering
the campaign of 1980.
Ronald Ronald Reagan,
Jimmy Carter, Ted Kennedy.
I mean, some larger than life dudes.
So, I said to Evan, "You
know, we're not getting
"this stuff in the magazine,
and we just get the...
"We should do a story on the
great American establishment
"and how it created the post-war world."
And we'd never written a book before.
And it was about six friends
that nobody had ever heard of,
Dean Acheson, Averell
Harriman, Bob Lovett.
And we walked down the street
in the place where we had a
summer house, Sag Harbor,
and there was an editor, Alice Mayhew,
and we said, "We want to do this book,"
and she said, "I've always
wanted to do a book like that.
"It's a prequel to The
Best and the Brightest,"

English: 
which is Halberstam's book about Vietnam,
in other words, it leads into it.
"And I've always wanted
to call it The Wise Men,"
because it was about these people.
And so, we got to write this book.
And it was oddly successful.
It it was because it was very, very, long,
so people couldn't quite
finish it, so they had to
say it was good, you
know, they couldn't...
Whatever it was, it did well,
and it made me think,
well this is really great,
writing narrative about people.
The other thing about Time Magazine then,
and when I was editor, we always
put a person on the cover.
It was Henry Luce, who
invented the magazine mantra,
"Tell the story of our
time, through people."
The people who make it.
Somebody said, "Well, you're inventing
personality journalism."
He said, "No, Time didn't invent that.
"The Bible did, that's how it works."
You know, Adam, Eve, Moses,
you do it through people.
And so, that got me
interested in a biographical

English: 
way of looking at the world.
- And what's your, and so, I guess it's
some of your really complimentary skills.
The biographies allow you to
go much deeper than just the...
And what's, you know, as
you go into, what was it,
late '90's, you transition
in, I guess Time
becomes part of Time Warner.
You become CEO-Chairman of CNN,
which doesn't seem like a natural jump.
- It wasn't, it was a very unnatural jump,
which I didn't want to make,
and I shouldn't have made.
You make mistakes in life.
And that was a two-headed mistake for me.
As you said, Time Warner owned both,
and I finished my stint as editor of Time.
They kept pushing me to do it.
It was a mistake because
I didn't like the medium.
I just don't like television.
I'm not very good at it, I
don't know how to make TV.
And I realized I was a pretty
good editor of the magazine,
simply because I knew every
detail of how it was done,
meaning if somebody came back
and said, "We can't get..."

English: 
You know, I had been in Russia or Poland,
during the fall of communism.
I've covered these things.
I also had, you know, designed pages,
so I could say, you know,
"Crop the picture this way,
"and you can do it in 2,000
words, but leave out this
"part, and make it a narrative.
"And there's a billboard graph
that will say all of that
"and get it out of the
way, " or something.
I mean, some people are
great, and they can be
the head of Proctor &
Gamble and then be the head
of United Airlines and then
you know, be a professor
and do all sorts of things.
Me, I kind of knew how to do
what I knew how to do, and
I shouldn't have gone into a
field where I didn't know it.
Secondly, I'm not a
great executive manager.
I'm not somebody who likes
bossing people around.
And at Time, it was quite easy because,
there are only like 60 or 70
people that I'd deal with.
I mean, two floors of the
building, you could walk around.
At CNN, there were like 6,000 people,
and I was supposed to be this manager.
And I realized, I like it
when people have to manage me

English: 
rather than me having to manage them.
And so I didn't like that executive role.
And so, that was a three
year detour that was not
something I enjoyed.
- And then you go to
your current position,
which is head of the Aspen...
- When my current contract was up, I...
Well, I mean we had, unfortunately
9/11 and then the war.
The first, I mean the Iraq War.
I guess the second out
of three Iraq wars now,
depending on how you're counting them.
And so I waited through the end of that.
My contract was up, and it was like,
I want to write books.
I want to be involved
in, you know, thought
and bringing people
together and doing things.
And the Aspen Institute came on.
- And what's your role, what do you see as
the role of the Aspen Institute?
It's kind of a really
interesting organization.
- Yeah, Sal has joined on board.
It's a great organization,
been around 60 years.
And it's partly a think tank.
We have policy programs,
and everything from
the environment, education, whatever.
It's partly a tank that does things.
I mean, we have Middle East loan funds.

English: 
We're working with Khan
Academy to try to, you know,
put together American civics courses.
But it's also, and I wish there
were a better word for it.
Seems like, you know, a 50 cent
word for a 25 cent product,
which is convening.
We bring people together,
and that's something that
you particularly don't have in Washington
or other places these days,
with Democrats, Republicans,
left, right, people with
different persuasions,
come together, sit around a table,
spend a few days together, exchange ideas.
It's particularly interesting
to me that in the digital age,
when we thought that we could all Skype
and do things on Google Hangouts,
and chat rooms, and live virtually,
there's actually more a
hunger for in-person meetings.
This is why you have a room like this,
is why people hang out.
And in some ways Googleplex
meets Google Hangouts,
having a nice environment like this.
So, the Aspen Institute
has grown quite a bit

English: 
through ideas, festivals,
and many other things,
which is where people
watching things on YouTube,
doing Khan Academy videos.
But at the end of which they kind of say,
"Okay, now let's get together.
"I want to be in flesh and discuss it."
- That's, I think, what's
interesting about you.
You have this, you're a historian
and now the Aspen Institute.
You're kind of a convener;
you're very plugged into
kind of, the current state of affairs.
You've been in Washington.
But you're also intimately
involved in Silicon Valley.
I know this, the latest book,
which isn't even out yet.
- Not until next month, but you get
an advance copy.
- The innovators...
It's a history of Silicon Valley,
essentially.
- Correct.
- And obviously, you've
done the biographies...
- It actually starts at
your alma mater, MIT,
with the Tech Model Railway Club,
and the people creating
Spacewar, and all the people
in the late '40s, who come
up with those video games
and hands on computing.
But then it moves west,
and it tries to explain why
people like yourself move
from MIT to the Valley.

English: 
- And that's whats fascinating,
because it's a history
about kind of something
that is defining the future.
And then you also have
this Aspen Institute,
what's going on in DC.
And so, with this kind of
futurist slash historian hat,
I mean, where do you think we are?
It's very easy for us
to get caught up in the,
you know, what's going on,
week by week, you know.
You're on the Apple board.
Apple announced it's new iPhone
today, all this craziness.
But you know, 25 years from
now, 50 years from now,
500 years from now, how are
people going to think about now?
- I think they'll think
about it just as they thought
100 years ago, about 1840 and
the Industrial Revolution,
where you start having steam engines
and mechanized products, and
it changes the whole way.
I mean, instead of people,
artisans weaving fabrics, it's
now done, and it changes
employment and everything else.
So, I think you have that disruption.
I think we're at the stage
of the Digital Revolution,
where we're just getting out of pouring
old wine into new bottles.

English: 
You know, for the first 20,
30 years of the Revolution,
we had the internet, we had
online, we had computers,
but we were still taking
op-ed pieces and pouring
them online, you know, blogs or something.
Or we were taking Time Magazine
and putting in on the Web,
and it would be an online,
you know, Time Online.
But we weren't inventing whole new things.
There were three or four industries that
did not get disrupted, which
gets back to Khan Academy.
Early on, healthcare and medicine
did not get disrupted
the way it should have.
And K through 12 education, I mean,
I wrote about Ben Franklin.
He invented a type of
school that he called
The Academy for the Education of Youth,
and what it was was about
24 kids sitting in a row,
and the teacher in front and a blackboard,
and a lecture and then a test.
That was, whatever, 1740.
And you flash ahead, you know,
two and a half centuries,

English: 
and we're still doing it that way.
So, the disruption you all
in this room are bringing
to K through 12 education,
and in your book, The
One Room Schoolhouse.
That's beginning to kick in.
So, the next phase is when
we quit pouring old wine
in new bottles, and frankly
the first people doing
online learning and stuff, it
was simply taking a camera,
pointing in Sanders
Theater to Mike Sandel,
and he would give a lecture,
and they would call that
an online course.
I do think especially with
Addax, you're seeing a platform
that does it quite differently now,
and has a feedback loop that says,
"Okay, that works, that doesn't,".
Likewise, you're doing
it much differently.
You're not just putting a
high school course online.
And that's what I mean about
new wine for the new bottle.
So, we're getting into that age.
I think there's a lot still to be done.
I mean, books have not been disrupted.
I wanted with Steve Jobs, and
now I'm a whole book later,

English: 
and still don't have it
happen, I want to take a book
and write it, and curate it.
But I want it to be open
source, like Wikipedia.
I want everybody in
that book, from Wozniak
to Bill Gates to Dan Bricklin,
or you know, or Stewart Brand.
I mean, they don't have
to be major characters.
Or even people who aren't
in the book, but have,
"Oh, I have this video,
I was at this (mumbles),"
to be able to put stuff up.
So, you write a collaborative
book that's multimedia.
People putting up the code
they wrote for the first
basic interpreter for the
Altair, and somebody else
is putting up the circuit design
for the Altair in the book,
and somebody else is
saying, "Here's the video
"of Steve's first launch of the Apple II."
That sort of thing.
If you had a collaborative
project like that
I think should be curated,
'cause I'm a control freak.
I don't want everybody just
to put whatever they want,
but I want, and I was working
with Ev Williams yesterday.
I don't know if you know who
he is, but he did Twitter

English: 
but now does Medium.
I put some of my chapters on Medium,
and people could put comments and things,
but I could reject them,
or I could include them.
So, it gives me some
curatorial power, and then
eventually we'll have
to have payment systems,
where, especially, I mean,
I'm not trying to do this,
you know, for money the now.
If my book is written
and 40 percent of it is
people have collaborated
and crowdsourced it,
when people read those
sections, there should be some
metering, and the royalties should go,
just like if a song is played
on the radio, the original
composer of that song gets a
fraction of a cent royalty.
We ought to have ways to collaboratively
crowdsource things and to
allocate royalties based on that.
That's just one example of
where I think things might go.
I wanted always to do a book
on our hometown boy, Louis Armstrong.
And I want to do it with Marsalis.
I want Wynton to be able
to say, "Okay, when we do
"West End Blues, we see him
take this 17 bars, and".

English: 
(scats) "You know, just rag it."
And if I wrote that, nobody would know
what I'm talking about, but
if Wynton is saying, you know,
"Here's how Kid Ory did
it, and now here's how
"Louis Armstrong did it,"
you'd say, okay, I get it.
And so, those type of
projects, we aren't there yet.
But I keep waiting for
those platforms to be built.
- Yeah, that's, that's amazing.
I mean, one thing that's
fascinating about you.
I mean, you even just mentioned it now.
Even with Louie Armstrong is, you know,
the thread of all the
people you write about,
and especially with this book.
This is kind of a combination
of a bunch of books.
Whether it's Franklin or
Einstein or Louie Armstrong
or Steve Jobs, they're
all, actually, innovators,
And in some degree, kind of
scientists in their domain.
- Absolutely, I mean different
biographers or writers
are interested in different things.
Some people like crime stories.
Some like war heroes.
You know, writing about Eisenhower, D-Day.
Some like sports heroes, some like...
You know literary biographies.

English: 
They want to write, you know,
the biography we've all been
waiting for for Joyce
Carol Oates or something.
I like people who are imaginative
and not just smart, because
you know you're in this room.
Smart people are a dime a dozen.
What really matters is being imaginative,
being able to thing different,
to use Steve Sperling's...
And, so I sort of say, "What makes..."
You know, Ben Franklin wasn't
the smartest of the founders.
I think Jefferson, Madison,
you've got a lot of
really sharp cookies in that box.
But Franklin had a certain
ability to think more
imaginatively, to be more creative.
What makes for creativity?
And I don't know that I said
out, I like to think okay,
when people ask me, if they're
not a friend, and I'm...
You know, I'm being more honest with you.
Normally I always say,
"Yeah, I try to write about
"creativity, what happens,
how people think differently."
Actually, I wrote about Kissinger,
which believe it or not,

English: 
was a very creative thinker
and the balance of power
he did with Russia and China,
during our extrication from Vietnam.
And then obviously, Franklin, Einstein...
But it wasn't like I started out saying,
"Let me make a list of people
"who have thought imaginatively."
It was only two or three
books into it that I said,
"That's sort of the theme
that I keep exploring."
- And what do you think it is,
I mean, you mentioned this.
It's not necessarily the raw mental
horsepower that's doing it.
I mean, do you think it's
think it's just this kind of
creativity gene, or do
you think it's something
that they developed and that
they cultivated, and they...
- Well, the good news is there's
not a once sentence answer,
which is why you get to
write 600 page biographies,
instead of saying, "Here's the answer.
"You don't need to read the book."
However, part of it, I
do think, is being able
to connect the arts or humanities,
having a real feel for beauty, let's say,
with technology, engineering, and science.
And if you, and I'm sure some of you've
actually worked at Apple.

English: 
I don't know, I assume
Tim did not do it today,
but in every one of Steve's
launches, the last thing
on the screen would be that
intersection of the streets,
the liberal arts and the
sciences, I think it was,
technology, whatever.
And he said, and it's the
very first pages of my book.
He says, "When I was a kid,
I loved the humanities,
"but I was also an electronics
geek," and then I read
something that Edwin Land,
who invented Polaroid
said, which is, "If you
stand at that intersection,
"of the arts and the sciences,
that's where true value is."
That's what Leonardo da
Vinci did, that's what...
And so I think that's one of
the secrets of true creativity.
Far too often, and it's
why the Khan Academy videos
are important to me,
and I think are great,
and why your whole learning
growth thing is important,
if you're a humanities
person, meaning you studied
you know, literature,
the arts, maybe history,

English: 
you get intimidated by science and math.
And it's odd, maybe not people you know,
but people that I know would even brag,
"Oh, I don't know math.
"I couldn't tell you an integral from a
"differential equation or a
transistor from a resistor,
"or a gene from a chromosome."
They would never brag about
saying, "I couldn't tell you
"Hamlet from Macbeth"
or couldn't, you know.
And so it's socially acceptable
not to know math and science.
And that should not be the case.
And that's why I wrote the
Einstein book, in particular.
Part of our problem, of the
C.P. Snow's two culture problem
comes from Einstein.
It's not his personal
fault, but up until then,
the Newton mechanical
universe was something
the average person,
Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson,
they all could pretty much understand.
You know, the laws of motion,
the equal and opposite
reactions, balances.
You read it in the Constitution,
the balances that come in.

English: 
With Einstein, suddenly, time is relative,
and you know, gravity bends light,
and the quantum, you know...
At the subatomic level and
quantum mechanics, you know.
We're not, have strict
determinate, strict laws...
And, whoa, all of a sudden,
science becomes something that
the average person can't cope with.
- But that's part of what
you're saying is that,
in order for some of these folks to,
the kind of culture is in
the wrong place right now.
It's not favoring more of the
creativity and innovation,
because there's a lot
of very smart people,
probably on either side
of that Venn diagram
who are afraid to go
into that intersection.
- Yeah, and I'm trying to say
if you look at Ben Franklin,
the most important
scientist of his period.
Even though you probably don't...
You know, we think of
him as a doddering dude
playing his kite in the rain.
Single fluid theory of
electricity that comes from his
electricity experiments is
up there in that century,
you know, with Newton, even.

English: 
I mean, he's the best experimental
scientist of his time.
Jefferson would have thought
you were a Philistine
if you didn't study botany
and everything else.
Nowadays, people like a Ben Franklin
don't do electricity experiments.
And even when I was growing up...
I'm in a slightly different category.
My dad is an electrical engineer.
All my uncles were electrical engineers,
so I grew up with heathkits and ham radios
and soldering irons and figuring
out different transistors
and making circuits.
But many kids in the '60s did that.
And there's a problem now, too, that
if you're a computer kid growing up today,
you're not even allowed
to change the battery
in your computer, much less, you know,
screw with the circuit board.
- Kind of, taking that too,
this book, which is as we said,
it's about the founding
of this tech revolution
that we're in in Silicon Valley.
When you wrote this book, and
I'm sure this is something

English: 
that you've been thinking
about, especially with the
Steve Jobs book, what do
you think is special about
either Silicon Valley or the
time we're in now that it's
allowing it to be what it is?
- Yeah, I mean there are
multiple layers of this.
One is, why does the United
States tend to, still,
even with the 17th best
education system in the world,
meaning, we're not the
best educated these days,
but we still invent more things than
get invented in other countries.
And secondly, why was there a migration to
Silicon Valley in particular, in the 70's?
I have a whole chapter,
besides writing about people,
you also have to write
about cultural forces.
I mean, history is also cultural forces.
It's not just people doing things.
And in the late '60s and
early 70's, you had a lot
of movements out here.
One was sort of the hobbyist movement.
The other was electronics, because
Westinghouse and all the
defense industries coming.

English: 
But also, there were two
counterculture movements,
the hippie movement with
a lot of, you know...
Personal empowerment, and, you know...
Likewise, the anti-war movement
and the free speech movement at Berkley.
And they all come together in the Bay area
with a lot of great
music, the soundtrack by
the Grateful Dead.
And it's rebellious.
It's personally empowering.
It's defiant of authority, all of these.
And it creates an atmosphere
where the computer,
which had been thought of
as a big Orwellian, George Orwell
type thing that governments
and the military
and big corporations got to have.
It's like, no...
There's a wonderful...
The Homebrew Computer
Club had a newsletter.
"It's computer power to the
people," was the mantra.
And that played off the
"power to the people"

English: 
mantra of the 60's and 70's in this area.
So, you had that cultural
stew, that milieu.
I remember talking to Tim Berners-Lee,
obviously the guy who
creates the web protocols,
and he said, "I'm the exact
same age as Steve Jobs
"and Bill Gates," born in 1955,
my generation.
He said, "I was doing
the same thing they were.
"Every time a new electronic
component would come along,
"like a new transistor, that
was really cool, and then
"I figured out, okay,
microchips come along.
"I can make more things...
"Home microprocessors,
so I went down to Oxford,
"and I was there, same age as Woz
"and Steve and all.
"And I created my home
computer, the way they did.
"A circuit board," and he said,
"And then I got to
Oxford here, and what was
"I supposed to do with it?"
There was no (mumbles),
there was no guy driving up
like Don Valentine to
Steve Jobs' family garage,

English: 
and saying, "I'll fund you,
make this into a company".
And so he said, "We didn't
have that entrepreneurial stew
"and that rebellious spirit in England
"that you had in the Valley."
- And where do you think we are now?
What do you think, do you
think the Valley, do you think
this is, what's the next 30
years going to look like?
Do you think it's only
gaining more momentum?
It's definitely changed.
- No, and I don't wanna, I mean...
You may not all definitely
want to hear it,
because I love the Valley,
but I think when you...
The next phase, as I
said, is the connection
of the creativity
industries with technology.
And it's not as much as
an engineer-driven game
as a creativity-driven
game, whether you're in
fashion or journalism or playwrighting
or RPGs and LARPs, whatever
it is that makes you creative.
The tying in of creativity to
technology is the creation of the new wine
for the engineered
bottles that we now have.
And that's why I think
you're seeing San Francisco

English: 
property values...
I just came late last
night from San Francisco.
And I was even at the Pier
48 area, where you just
stand outside and watch
condos rise, and you know
people have bidding wars for them.
And so I think, that's something
you and have talked about,
Mountain View, Palo Alto,
whatever, how are you
going to have a more culturally rich life,
for creative people who
want to do things like
go to talks, go to plays,
go to music, go to whatever.
There is some of that
here, but not as much as in
San Francisco, so you want
to build up the magnet
of creativity and diversity.
You and I know, growing up
in New Orleans, if you have
blacks and Creoles and
Vietnamese and Spanish,
and people coming back from
the Spanish-American War,
and the sanctified church, and you know,
Italians and everything else,
all in the neighborhood,
then you're going to get
a stew that produces jazz.
So, I think one of the
things for the next few years
would be, how do you have the diversity

English: 
and the creativity everywhere?
Why is Austin doing well?
And I think that's a
challenge for Mountain View
and Palo Alto, and it's a
challenge that's easily met.
And I guess the second big trend is
some of the technology that's coming up
will be biotech, not infotech,
and that's harder to do in garages.
I mean, that's wetware, not software.
And you kind of need
the big hospital systems
and other things, which
is why your old haunts
of MIT and Harvard may get
a second bite of the apple,
no pun intended.
- Yeah.
Kind of just to put everything together,
as you know we're going
this whole campaign
around, you know, you can
learn anything mindset.
Given all your experience
and the people who
you have known, interviewed, studied,
what would you tell to a young person who
may be a person who considers
themselves good at writing,
but is fearful of math?

English: 
Or someone who considers
themselves good at math
and is fearful of writing?
What advice would you have for them?
- Well, since I'm not a
preacher, I'm a storyteller,
I'll tell a story, which is
that Einstein was no Einstein
when he was a kid.
He was slow in learning how to talk.
You know, so slow they consulted a doctor.
And the family maid
called him "der Depperte",
the dopey one, in the family.
And so it takes him awhile.
He doesn't...
He's not able to do things
in a verbal way as easily, so
he thinks in pictures, what
he calls "thought experiments.
Like what would happen if lightning struck
both ends of a moving train?
Would you see it the same
if you were on the train
or on the platform?
All of his great breakthroughs are done
through visual thought experiments.
So, you begin by thinking,
if Einstein was no Einstein
when he was a kid, I can be
anything if I want to learn.
Also it's why I like journalism and
why I like doing what
I do, which is everyday
I could learn something different.
I could be in Eastern
Europe and try to figure out

English: 
why communism was falling,
and then I could go
to CERN and figure out
what they were going to do
with the Higgs boson
particle if they found it.
I had to learn these things.
And for me, once I got successful enough
as a biographer, that's when I
bit off things like Einstein.
Partly because I wanted to tell people,
"Hey, you should learn,"
and that you shouldn't
be intimidated by science.
But partly I wanted to
tell myself, which is,
can I understand general relativity?
I first got turned on to Khan Academy
when I had to learn tensor calculus,
which is not so much in the
book, but I had to understand
the tensor calculus that
Einstein used to show
the curvature of the universe,
or the fabric of space and time.
And I realized that I've
got to get all my calculus
dusted off, and I started
going to Khan Academy
and saying, "Okay, let
me boom, boom, boom."

English: 
And also, this was a cool thing, which is,
you're never too old to learn.
I can now learn...
not enough of general
relativity that I'm going to
be able to debate Brian
Greene on string theory,
but enough that I can talk to him about it
and learn from him.
- And I guess just one last question,
what advice do you have for us?
You're familiar with the
organization, Khan Academy,
and kind of some of our aspirations,
but you have a historian's mind,
so what advice would you
have for us if we really
do want to, over the next 50 or 100 years,
become something that can empower
billions of folks?
- You know, I'm going to
blow smoke for a moment.
Which is, I actually think
what you're doing is so good,
which is why I've been a fan, which is why
I felt lucky to get to know you.
I watch other people trying to do things,
pouring old wine into new bottles,
Michael Sandel making...
which is now a good
course bit it took awhile.

English: 
I think what you're doing
really is defining it very well.
How learning can work.
I've tried to do one additional angle
in our work with you,
which is my belief that
people can learn alone
by doing these videos
and it's good because they
can learn at their own pace,
but there's something
that's probably the oldest
philosophy around, which is Aristotle's.
Which is, man is a social animal.
That, in the end, people kind
of like getting together.
That it's a collaborative,
personal, group process
of learning and exchanging ideas.
So I've pushed a little bit,
and we've been trying to do it
at the Apsen Institute, is to combine
the online learning with
a place-based convening,
which is, if you get through this course,
and you do this essay, and
you pass it, and you...
Not only do you get a
badge and something signed
by Sal and everything else,
but you can apply for
scholarships, because we'll

English: 
raise the money, and you can come to,
say we do something as we're doing now on
privacy and the constitution
with Sandra Day O'Connor
and Justice Roberts
and a few other people,
say, "Okay, you take that
course, and if you do well,
"apply for one of these things,
and we'll pick 100 scholars
"from around the country
who finish the course",
and you get to go to
Philadelphia and sit down
with Sandra Day O'Connor, have a weekend.
You come to Washington
and you get to hang out
at the Supreme Court, and
get to meet the other people
who did the course with you.
So, I think combining virtual
learning with place-based
learning, which is obviously
something you write
about in One Room Schoolhouses,
it's obviously things
that Rocketship have done.
That's next phase of the
revolution, is how do you
blend it in, because we're never going
to be something Aristotle
wouldn't recognize.
We're never going to be people
who like to learn alone.
I think it was Franklin who
said, I know it was Franklin.

English: 
What he said was, "He that
would try to learn alone
"or drink alone, would
be like the person who
"tries to catch his horse alone."
It's something you have
to do with other people.
This is why I don't get
asked to speak at high school
graduations that often
or college graduations.
Almost every one of my characters
drops out and runs away.
Einstein, you know,
hates school, drops out
in Germany, runs away to Switzerland.
Ben Franklin runs away to Philadelphia.
Steve Jobs drops out of Reed.
I guess that's all, Franklin...
Kissinger doesn't, I mean, that's...
The Nazis take over, so
that's a different issue.
All of them are rebellious, in a way.
They all run away from home.
And that makes them,
in some ways, more open
to learning experiences, I think.

English: 
Or to think out of the box.
I mean, one way to answer
is, I go back and forth
about writing about current figures
and writing historical figures.
And you know, there's an
different set of muscles you need
if you're going to interview
somebody like a Steve Jobs.
The interesting thing
about the innovators is
it's both historical,
you know, people like
John von Neumann and Alan
Turing, who obviously I never
got to meet and do it
through archival research.
But then people like
Bill Gates or Steve Jobs,
who spend hours and hours
allowing me to interview them.
So, I try to do the mix there.
I think you always have to
put someone in historical
context, but you also
have to judge them by
how history turned out.
The best example is slavery.

English: 
In the end, I don't think
Jefferson was a great man.
In the end, he didn't
even free his slaves.
And you say, "Well, you have to understand
"the historical period.
"He was back then, and
that's what they did."
No, Benjamin Franklin also, at one point,
had two household slaves,
and it occurs to him
how abhorrent that is.
And so he becomes the
President of the Society
for the Abolition of Slavery.
So, this is the great debate in history,
which is, do you judge
people by their period,
or do you say, "No,
history proved them wrong.
"And that's something we judge them by."
I'm a little bit in the latter camp.
Even a Churchill, who's a great man,
but so against the anti-colonial, you know
against Ghandi, against everything else.
Well, you look at history.
He was on the wrong side of that one.
So, as great as he was
during World War Two,
you say, "No, umm...".
Even though a lot of people
were racist and anti-semitic
and pro-colonial and
everything else back then,

English: 
not that he was anti-semitic,
but you know, people...
You don't just say, "Yeah,
I excuse them because
"that's the way they were at the time."
You say, "No, these people turned out
"to be better than these people."
Well, two things, I would like to invent
the new wine for the new bottle.
I would like to invent
what I told you about,
a collaborative,
multimedia, crowd sourced,
yet curated, guided,
new thing that people would say,
"Oh yes, when Gutenberg did the
movable type printing press,
"pretty soon afterwards
lots of things happened."
The Reformation would have...
But even novels begin to happen.
You can have novels if
you have a printing press.
I want to say, "I was
involved in figuring out
"what type of new narrative
"nonfiction," and it can
be fiction, but I'm...

English: 
I'll probably leave that to somebody else.
Just like, if it's fiction, you
would say, "Okay, let's take
"role playing games and
LARPs," and blah blah blah
and say, "How are we
going to have interactive
"storytelling fiction?"
I want to do that with nonfiction.
And I think that would be cool.
I've been somewhat
involved over the years,
and not truly inventing the
future like the real innovators.
But I ran a digital media,
TimeInc, in the early '90s,
and it was right when
the web browser was first
invented, which is, I think '93 or '94,
when Mosaic comes out of
University of Illinois.
And we said, "Okay,
let's create websites,"
and even we invented some things
that probably weren't good,
like banner ads and popup ads
and ways to pay for things that we do.
And I was part of the team that invented
some of those things.
I'm not going to take
blame or credit for it,
but at least I was in that mix of people,
who said, "We will create websites.

English: 
"We will take news and journalism
"and invent things like Pathfinder."
I mean, new brand names that would create
ways of doing news and
blogs and integrate them.
And we had a lot of failures.
I mean, one of which is, we were
totally advertising
dependent, because we were
making so much money on ads.
So, we didn't become
reader dependent, and so
we began catering to advertisers.
Another is that we took
the community that we had
created before the Web was
invented, the community
found on the WELL, or America Online,
where people write bulletin
boards and chat rooms,
and every night they'd
be discussing issues.
And we relegated those
to comments on the bottom
of our articles, that were
stupid, anonymous, dumb,
and nobody read them.
So, we went from being a community service
to being a publishing service online.
And that was a step backwards.
I like to think we did some things
that were kind of good,
though, like create
beautiful web pages and designs.

English: 
We integrated words and
multimedia and video
and pictures, and that
was sort of a new thing.
We created those, you know, in Pathfinder,
and Hotwire did it better than we did,
a lot of the early websites of 1994.
So, I would like to say I want one more
turn at the wheel on invention.
And I have a couple of biographies,
just plain old biographies
that I'm gonna write,
including a historical one
about the ultimate guy,
Leonardo da Vinci, who combines art and
science like nobody else did.
- Well done, that's a
great note to end on.
Well, thank you so much, Walter.
Real honor.
- My honor.
(audience claps)
