#503: Walter Isaacson on CRISPR, Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race
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At this altitude, I can run flat.
Out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I answer your personal question now? I just didn't approach time. What if I did the opposite?
I'm a cybernetic organism. Living tissue over metal endoskeleton.
The Tim Ferriss show. Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs, this is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss show. You know, I haven't even noted that my standard intro says germs over and over and over. Again, that may be a bit of foreshadowing for some of our discussion today. Nonetheless, my job normally is to interview world class performers of all different types, and in some cases better still to interview people who have studied many world class performers. And that is certainly the case today. My guest is, for the second time on the podcast, Walter Isaacson. Walter is a professor of history at Tulane, has been CEO of the Aspen Institute, chair of CEn, and editor of Time. He is the author of many books you will no doubt recognize. Leonardo da Vinci, the innovators, Steve Jobs, Einstein subtitled his life in universe, Benjamin Franklin, an American Life, and Kissinger subtitle a biography his co author of the Wise Men, six Friends and the world they made. His new book is the Code Breaker subtitle Jennifer Dowdna believe I'm getting that right. D-O-U-D-N-A gene editing and the future of the human race. You can find our first conversation from 2017 at Tim blog. Walter he did a spectacular job and you can find much more about him at isaacson isaacson tulane.edu Walter, welcome back to the show.
Hey, it's great to be back with you.
Tim and I have no shortage of material, as usual. We covered a lot of your personal biographical information, many of your practices, writing process, et cetera, in our last conversation, so I won't spend a lot of time on that. People can listen to our first chat if they want to dive into those topics, but I'm going to ask a few questions before we get into talking about Crispr and Jennifer and so many other things. And the three questions are going to be, and these are my shorthand notes in front of me, bio of Louis Armstrong. Why not? Then the second is professor, and I may have asked you this already, but I want to ask again because I'm curious, professor, why? Meaning how did you decide to, on top of, and in addition to everything else that you do, become a professor of history? And then third, just because I want to give people a teaser. Chinese CRISPR babies. How so? There's the why, not the why and the how. You have so many books you have completed. I honestly just am constantly impressed at how much not just work, but high quality writing you produce. So I'm curious about the survivorship bias. Right. So could you please speak to the bio of Louis Armstrong or the would be bio of Louis Armstrong?
Well, any performance I have comes from reading your books, Tim, so thanks for having me on the show. I learn peak performance and I try hard to get up to about 10% of what you say, I should be able to do, but sometimes you have to put something aside. Leonardo da Vinci knew that because he only finished twelve full paintings and put ones aside, that he couldn't get perfect. And I had to do that once. With a biography of Lewis Armstrong. I'm here in New Orleans, my hometown. I wanted to write about the birth of jazz and Lewis Armstrong and race and growing up in New Orleans in the early 20th century. And I listened to all of the recordings he did, the tapes he did of discussions. I read all of his notes and his letters. I went to Corona, Queens, where there's a Louis Armstrong museum. And after a while, I felt I knew everything there was to know about Louis Armstrong except for who he was. I didn't know why he was smiling. I didn't know if he's happy. I didn't know if he really liked white people or whether his best friend, who was his white manager, was somebody he didn't like. And I realized that if you cannot crack the code, you're better off not writing the book.
Are there other subjects you've considered? I'm sure there must be and begun to work on, only to put aside, like so many paintings of Da Vinci's.
Well, you know, I did Ada Lovelace, who in the 1840s and 1850s comes up with the concept of the computer algorithm, and she's the first chapter in the last chapter of my book, the Innovators. And I had tried or considered making an entire biography of her. I went to Oxford University with her letters. She was the daughter of Lord Byron, who her letters are part of the Byron papers there. But unfortunately, there just wasn't enough to make a full length biography. So I used her as the framing device for the innovators.
We're going to come back to Ada. I want to use that as a device for
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