"The SECRET To Success All Starts With This ONE TRAIT!" | Walter Isaacson & Jay Shetty

i think people's minds are being open to well maybe using genetic edits to make us less susceptible to viruses remind me again what's wrong with that crispr is also being used more specifically for detection technologies both jennifer doudna's group and her competitors out in the broad institute at mit and harvard have produced these small at-home testing kits which will roll out in the next few months that can test for any genetic sequence [Music] hey everyone welcome back to on purpose the number one health podcast in the world thanks to each and every one of you that come back every week to listen learn and grow now it's not often that i get to sit down with someone whose work i've studied as deeply as our guest today but some of the books that i recommend the most in my life that have been life-changing for all of you when you're saying to me jay what's your favorite books a number of them come from today's author so today's guest is none other than walter isaacson who has been a journalist and author and professor of history at tulane he's the past ceo of the aspen institute where he is now a distinguished fellow and has been the chairman of cnn and the editor of time magazine walter is the author of best-selling biographies on leonardo da vinci einstein and steve jobs and has a new book out today which is called the code breaker jennifer doudna gene editing and the future of the human race uh walter i'm so excited to have you on the show like i said your biographies on steve jobs and einstein particularly uh go down as two of my favorite books of all time and this one has been the most intriguing read i was not expecting you to do this uh but thank you so much for doing the show jay thank you for all you just said yeah i mean every word uh i i put the steve jobs biography into my uh top three books of all time well that's because of steve jobs i just tried to report and uh he's the one who led the interesting life no absolutely but you you captured it splendidly and beautifully but uh i wanted to start somewhere a bit more wild card uh walter i wanted to ask you that i've noticed that you have a keen interest in basketball uh and you retweet these uh little basketball videos all the time uh when when did you fall in love with the sport and who's your team i just actually like the new orleans pelican so i'm very much a new orleans person and uh i'm in mourning about drew brees retiring from the saints i love zion and the pelicans so uh i can't really help you as being a brilliant uh i'm not gonna do uh the final four for you and i'm not gonna do any brackets who's been your favorite player of all time you know my favorite player in some ways was bill bradley for many reasons including a wonderful book about him that john mcphee wrote which is about a sense of place well yeah no i asked because we've we've had some incredible uh basketball players and athletes on the podcast before uh kobe bryant and dennis rodman uh were both both filming also i mean obviously michael jordan when i was editor of time and he was in that last it was going to be his last series of games and they were in the playoffs and it was a sunday night game and time magazine had to go to press on a saturday night but i knew he was going to win i don't remember that sunday night i knew he was going to win and on saturday night i did a cover we did a cover at time and i you know authorized it it's a beautiful picture of him and says we may never see his like again and then had to stay up on sunday night biting my fingernails but of course he won the game in the last few seconds and uh i knew he would that's incredible that's when you had to predict the news right you had to predict the outcome uh when you were making decisions and papers you got it right but there was plenty of interest uh interesting events of fake news there but i don't go on podcasts and tell you all the times i made mistakes i'll just tell you the time i got it right with michael jordan i love it i love it walter well walter like i said before you've written some incredible biographies and i can't wait to talk about the code breaker today as well but how did you get into actually writing about geniuses icons innovators because it's it's a real task to get so intimately deep into someone's life and be able to share their life in such an authentic way how did you first find that fascination and then secondly develop the skill and the art of storytelling well i come out of louisiana here and i had a mentor a novelist named walker percy not that famous but a great novelist he said that two types of people come out of louisiana preachers and storytellers he said for heaven's sake be a storyteller the world's got far too many preachers and i think that's the best way to tell story even a story about gene editing and you know rna vaccines is not just doing an analytical story or opinion piece or whatever is instead say let me tell you a story and you make it a journey of discovery and so what i like to write are journeys of discovery about creative people now you know in my career i've known a lot of smart people but at a certain point i realized smart people are a dime a dozen they don't amount to much you have to be like steve jobs and think different and so what is it that makes people creative and so with any of my subjects we go hand in hand on a journey and i'd almost call it an adventure in which we say okay you know here we're going to go through this together we're going to grow we're going to learn things and we're going to see how the creative process works so if i have a aim it's what is creativity and how do people achieve it and the best way to do it is not say here are seven lessons the creativity or the 12 secrets to creativity i don't those books don't appeal to me what appeals to me is the way the bible does it it's the way biographers have always done it is let me tell you a story and you you explain creativity to the journey of a person whether it be ben franklin steve jobs or jennifer doudna or leonardo da vinci yeah that would be cool absolutely no i love that that's that's such a great answer and uh obviously some of these people you've actually spent time with and some of them of course you didn't spend time with what's the difference between that opportunity like what's the difference in the process because i can imagine that not spending time with someone and researching their life is far more difficult but at the same time it's quite challenging to be so intimate with someone without judging and projecting your own view of them onto them so how are you able to balance both yeah you do end up um when you spend a lot of time with somebody you bond with them and in some ways even though steve jobs had a lot of rough edges i tried to put it in such a context because i so thought he was an amazing person that i said okay he drove people mad he drove him crazy but he also drove them to do things that they never knew they would be able to do and when you're able to walk alongside side somebody actually in real life like i did with steve jobs or with jennifer doudna you know about a thousand times more than you can ever know about a ben franklin or leonardo where you're you know looking through notebooks and looking through letters to figure out what happened i mean steve jobs would spend hours going over his ipod playlist with me and why you know two different versions of you know glenn gould's variations or you know both sides now and the joni collins and judy you know judy collins joni mitchell versions all these things and even like on the ipod why the curves or the chamfers on the case were done the way it was for the fingers and each so i mean i just knew a zillion things about everything he did the interesting thing about doing with jennifer doud is we were doing it in real time it wasn't like me saying explain to me you know what it was like to start apple in the garage or what was wozniak like when you first met him when i was doing jennifer doudna things were happening in real time she had turned her attention you know to fighting the covid epidemic and i would be with her in her lab or i'd be on her slack channels or i'd be you know looking at resume meetings and so the book actually i hope unfolds as if you're part of a drama that's unfolding for all of us in real time yeah that's such a special thing about this book actually because you're right that when we remember events or people in hindsight it's it's always clouded with hindsight like there's always a different skew or a different perception whereas i definitely feel that in this book you're absolutely right there were jennifer doudna and also an individual that we don't know so much about so i remember seeing her ted talk back in 2015 that's when i'd first come across her and then when i saw your book i thought oh wow this is this is incredible but it's also someone that we all don't know much about outside of the fields that she's the number one expert an innovator in and that's why i felt like it was more of a discovery as well when did you start working with her and when did you get fascinated by her work well i got fascinated about 10 years ago with the life sciences because i had done the physics revolution with einstein the digital revolution with steve jobs and i realized that the revolution that will affect you know the current time the first half of the 21st century and our kids will not be the digital revolution but the life sciences revolution so as you said around 2015 she was doing the ted talks she also came to the aspen institute where i worked and i realized she would be a very good central character because it was not just about the gene editing technology of crispr it was about the fact that even as a young girl she had been reading things like the double helix and wanted to become a scientist but her school counselor says well no girls don't become scientists and so she pushes on that and everybody else in the 1990s it seemed in the field of biology was chasing dna in the human genome project and she and a few women like jillian banfield said actually rna is the more interesting molecule and then when she discovers how you can use rna as a guide to edit our own genes she has this nightmare that hitler summons her and wants to learn how to use it and so she becomes one of the leaders in the moral and ethical and policy debates and the more i talked to her and the more i heard about her i said well she's great as a central character now there are many other characters in the book there's fung jiang and there's george church and there's emmanuel sharpen jay but jennifer as a central character helps connect it back to the uh you know the time when watson and crick wrote the double helix all the way through the current period where day by day we're trying to create these new antiviral technologies and detection technologies using crispr yeah i heard her talk about in that talk i remember she she was speaking about how scared she was about how gene editing could be misused and uh you know used unethically but we'll get to that let's start by you explaining to us what crispr is because i think for people to really understand the power of this book and the work that you're doing they really do need to understand about how central this is going to be in the next revolution as you said right and it's a pretty simple system bacteria have been using it for a billion years and they're not all that smart what they do is whenever they get attacked by a virus and that war between bacteria and viruses is a worse war than even our war against viruses so whenever a virus attacks a bacteria or some of these bacteria the bacteria take a small mug shot of some of the genetic code of the attacking virus and the bacteria puts it in its own genetic sequence in these clustered repeated sequences known as crisprs and so if they ever have the virus attack them again they got this mug shot and they can use a tiny snippet of rna as a guide to go and use an enzyme to chop up the attacking virus so in other words it's a immune system that bacteria have developed and can adapt to each new wave of virus well that's really useful these days when it's happening to us but what's also useful is that jennifer doudna and emmanuel sharpen j with their colleagues figured out oh i can take that guide that's moving the enzyme to cut dna and i can reprogram it and i can make it cut dna wherever i tell it to and boom that was an aha moment in the lab because they said it could be used as a gene editing tool on humans so when we talk about crispr now we're talking about a pretty simple system that simply has a guide rna and an enzyme that cuts dna and it's a system to edit our dna a system to edit our genes and explain to us how that editing system was used during the pandemic or it's being used right now because i think sometimes when you hear about these ideas you kind of think oh that's a sci-fi movie uh that's probably something that's going to happen in the future a lot of people's minds will postpone that being practical but it's being used right now it's been used in the last 12 months well it's been used recently to cure genetic diseases such as sickle cell anemia in my book there's a wonderful person named victoria gray in mississippi she suffered sickle cell her whole life she had crispr used on her blood cells and she doesn't suffer from sickle cell now as a young kid david sanchez 17 years old loves playing basketball except for when he doubles over with sickle cell and they say okay we could also edit your reproductive cells so your children will never have sickle cell in other words we can make inheritable edits it'll be passed down throughout the species a chinese doctor did that two years ago and made inheritable edits on embryos so that the resulting twin girls didn't have the receptor for hiv the virus that causes aids now everybody including jennifer doudna was upset we don't want to be making inheritable edits yet we don't know if it's safe and we don't know if it's ethical but now that we're being hit with a virus pandemic i think people's minds are being open to well maybe using genetic edits to make us less susceptible to viruses remind me again what's wrong with that so we have to keep our minds open now in terms of the coronavirus crispr is also being used more specifically for detection technologies both jennifer doudna's group and her competitors out in the broad institute at mit and harvard have produced these small at-home testing kits which will roll out in the next few months that can test for any genetic sequence you know in our saliva you just have to spit into a low cartridge and so you can say do i have coronavirus does my kid have strep throat is that cancer recurring is uh do i have a bacterial infection and you know my gut microbiome you know biome should i be eating better yogurt it also can be used to directly kill viruses with vaccines we're using our own immune system and kicking them into gear to fight a virus if we get infected that's okay but our immune systems as we are finding out are rather tricky and it would be better just to have antivirals and to use crispr the way bacteria do which is uh let's just use it to directly chop up any viruses that we target in our system that's not quite ready yet but is working in the lab and will eventually be the better way we fight viruses what what are jennifer's uh pros and cons around crispr and gene editing like where does she feel it's adding value and where does she start to feel this is actually as you said you know ethically challenged this this is posing a negative usage uh challenges depending on whose hands this is in what are the pros and cons that she sees that you were able to observe and what were you shocked and surprised by and what were you happy about as you uh saw this journey unfold right and that's a good way to put it because it was a journey that unfolded uh what jennifer feels now just like what i feel now and i hope what everybody feels now is a little different than we felt two or three or four years ago after she had the nightmare she's gathering scientists and ethicists and religious leaders and saying how do we stop inherited gene editing how do we stop things unless they're really medically necessary i think and you'll read in the book there's no final answer here this is a journey so instead of saying you can't just turn to the last chapter of my book and say let me see the answer key here to tell me what we should do i think all of us have to have a feel for this technology have a feel for our own humanity for own children or nephews or nieces or you know and say all right how do i feel and i think our thinking will evolve as even the pandemic has made it evolve as for jennifer and for me thinking has evolved somewhat i was totally against any germline meaning inheritable gene edit and i was very much against any genetic editing except for very clear simple diseases but even before the pandemic when jennifer gave those talks you mentioned like the ted talk or when i was talking about this in a chat room somewhere i'd always have and she'd always have people come up afterwards or in the chat room and they'd say something like you know i have a 12 year old granddaughter and i think she's going to die in three years i've been told she's got a degenerative nerve disease can you get me in touch with jennifer doudna maybe she can fix it or i've got a son and the son has you know muscular dystrophy and it's a simple gene mutation can that be fixed so i think sometimes instead of saying wouldn't it be immoral to use gene editing you know in certain cases i also have to get my mind in the other direction and say wouldn't it be immoral not to use it in some cases so i don't want to preach as i said they're storytellers and preachers i'm just telling you a story but you're going to walk in this story with jennifer dowd and many other people and say all right i get it it's complicated maybe we should do simple diseases like sickle cell and muscular dystrophy and cystic fibrosis and tay sachs huntington's maybe there are other things we can do including making us less susceptible to viruses i think i would personally pause it'd be pretty easy to add height to your children or muscle mass i mean myostatin as you know can be regulated genetically and so you could have more muscular children if you decide i draw the line before doing that i think enhancements i think rich people buying better genes for their kids than poor people is a horror that we have to evolve avoid just like in brave new world or gattaca and i think editing out the diversity of our species i love the balcony behind me on royal street in the french quarter here in new orleans i just look down and see people tall and short and you know black and white and creole and you know various hues and fat and skinny and gay and straight and trans and you know sighted and blind and you know and i think okay the diversity of our species is a really cool thing let's not mess with that yeah that that's that's fascinating because yeah as soon as you get into the aesthetic enhancements it's it's different for its use from uh serving but but yeah it's such a subjective thing well to you know of what someone thinks is important and what is available to someone i one of the things that i love that you've helped me do personally and something that i like to encourage my listeners to do is to study people's lives uh you know i really believe as you were saying that the religious text the spiritual texts they regularly introduce us to stories of people that we can study i wonder what have you learned from jennifer doudner beyond of course the ideas of crispr and gene editing what are some of the things you learned about the way she lives and the way she thinks that you may have started to imbibe yourself or something that you admire and that you're passing on what are some of those more softer aspects one of the things is that creativity is a collaborative effort and innovation is a team sport and i realize that like steve jobs she's very good at creating teams unlike steve jobs she has a different method which is she likes her teams to really like each other she always if she's gonna have somebody come into her lab or be a postdoc or be hired they have to meet everybody else and there has to be a chemistry where they all click that's one form of leadership in team building and it works for her if you read doris kearns goodwin's team of rivals or about franklin roosevelt or steve jobs they often like to have more creative tension within the team well you know what that works too what i learned from jennifer doudna is you have to look inside yourself and say what is my best approach at being a collaborator a creative team builder and i'm going to do it my way and and you know be comfortable with it and i learned that i'm not a particularly great manager i like teaching i like writing but when they ask me to run a big company like cnn you know i i'm not good at being the boss every day and managing a lot of high maintenance people all the time so i watched jennifer dowd now say well play to your strengths here have creative small teams that get along well and that's different from people who are going to be managing huge enterprises with a lot of creative tension but each is a way to make a contribution to creativity i love that your answer is not singular it's not one dimensional it's the idea that certain people liked creative tension in teams and that that's how they succeeded and other people love creative chemistry and and that succeeded because i often think it's so easy to be like this is the only way that teams can thrive and teams can be successful but you're seeing from two phenomenal individuals and their teams that actually both have worked before and i look at ben franklin you know he wasn't the smartest of the founders and he wasn't the um you know that was jefferson of madison and he wasn't the most passionate that's sam adams or his cousin john uh but he was a team builder he's the one who can bring them all together and um you know and as i said i really don't like those books that have on their cover you know the seven secrets of building teams or something or you know creative team building and 12 easy lessons i think you have to learn that different people do it in different ways i did it differently at time magazine and cnn than you know other people did when they were running publications but i learned from jennifer make sure you understand what you're most comfortable with and lead with that strength that seems to be a recurring theme the idea of repeating strengths or uh emphasizing or going all in on your strengths seems to be a recurring theme what was what was it about steve jobs that you think rubbed off on you what what part of that energy or or abilities or skills or or things you saw did any of it if any of it rub off on you well there were many lessons from the book i wish more of them had rubbed off on me i'd love to be more like steve jobs although perhaps kinder and gentler at times but one of the things that impressed me was his passion for perfection and for the product when he was a young kid his dad was building a fence around the backyard of the house and young steve was helping with his hammer and his father said we have to make the back of the fence just as beautiful as the front and steve said well it faces these woods in marshland nobody will ever see it nobody will know his father said well you will know and so steve jobs even when it came to the circuit board and the original macintosh wanted it to look beautiful even though he had made the mac into an appliance that the ordinary user couldn't open i mean you know it didn't have you we didn't have a screw you could open up the back and see the circuit board but steve always felt that if you care enough about the beauty of the parts unseen you're going to have a passion for making a great product i think far too often people are trying hard to make a profit or they're trying hard to get a product out the door they don't pause and say i could sacrifice a little of the prophets and even sacrifice a little of the rush but i can make it really beautiful and even in a small way i mean that's why i hold my books for a year you know longer than i need to because i just want to go over and over again each thing but in a small way for example the paper quality of the book i kept pushing the publisher i want color pictures throughout i don't want it to be this little insert of things and i want high quality paper i learned that with the leonardo da vinci book and so this book i said you know take it out of my royalties we're going to split the cost of this but i don't want you to charge more than most books i want it to be you know less than most books but i want you to use high quality paper have color pictures throughout a lot of pictures because i just want people to feel the book and look at it and say oh that's a nice product even if they you know leaving aside whether i got the words all right i want the product to look good i want as steve jobs said even the parts unseen most readers don't know the paper stock and the weight of the paper stock and the count and i know that from the magazine world the matting and the you know the coding and stuff but they sense even the parts that they can't fully see they sent okay you tried to make it high quality that's what i did with this book and yeah you don't charge more but you just say it's going to be high quality yeah you definitely feel that you've done a fantastic job with show the color pictures i don't know it's beautiful yeah even even inside like this this is even yeah even this is stunning yeah even the impact would be beautiful and uh here are some of the color pictures i do want people to see it it's it it's absolutely beautiful to see you know remember a few people are on a podcast they're gonna be looking at this yeah everyone is listening to this i am showing pictures of the book so you have to get the book in order to see the pictures this one's great i love this picture oh yeah her in a lab holding the test tube as a young woman yeah tell me a bit about her when it came to that moment in her life when she was told girls don't become scientists how does she genuinely remember that moment was she someone just completely unaffected by it or oh no she was affected by it and you know what you'll see in the book and i hope she'll forgive me for saying so she's still got that streak of insecurity of having been a sixth grader and told no you can't do this and when she's in college you showed that picture of her holding the test tube at the pomona college chemistry lab she thought well maybe i can't do it maybe i should be a french major but she persists and so that's another lesson in this book and all the way through we all overcome some obstacles we all feel like outsiders at times you know maybe there are a few of us who don't have any insecurities but i've not met any and so i think we have to know the insecurities instead of ignoring them well i think that's what that's what really helped me when i was reading your work on both einstein and steve jobs was around the the number of failures and rejections and setbacks and not just the ones that make it onto movies or not just the ones that you know get glamorized in in hollywood but the deep understanding of just how crazy this is for someone to go through these events that's given me a lot of confidence that whenever i face failures and rejections i'm like i'm on the same path as steve joseph's like you know it's the same feeling of i can relate as opposed to thinking well oh well my life shouldn't have any challenges because steve's didn't have any challenges often we're not aware when it comes to someone like uh jennifer doudna what are the biggest challenges she's up against today from a from the world of science what are the challenges she's having to process uh from her own industry and her own work right now well she's having a good year right now having just won the nobel prize and somewhat of a surprise it came rather quickly it usually takes some decades to give a nobel prize to a field and she's really reduced the amount of rivalry and competition with her rival team at the broad institute of mit and harvard because they're both working on crispr detection technologies and i think it reminded all of us including all the scientists and i hope all the young readers and old readers of this book that sometimes when you're in a race when you're in a rival when you're being competitive that's great it spurs you on but then you get reminders that there's a noble reason you're doing this as well there's a higher calling helping humanity and so i think that she is driven right now and her setbacks are she still doesn't have that home testing kit totally approved and ready to be bought at your local drug store that the antiviral cast 13 it's called you know crisper cast 13 is she's got it licked they know how to make it work but it's hard to deliver it into the affected cells in the body so with science there's always another hurdle to overcome but the cool thing about science and why i like writing about this is the scientific method reminds us you got to keep an open mind you're going to do an experiment and it's going to fail and that means you're going to have to revise your theories well you know what we've been pretty bad at doing that in our politics and our civil discourse to be able to say well i actually have this belief in theory but i'm seeing new evidence so maybe i'll revise it you know we used to do that ben franklin did that that was the whole heart of his scientific method of forming a republic nowadays we don't do that in our society as much or a cable tv shout shows as much that's why we have podcasts because people can actually think things through yeah i love that as a cross pollination of an idea and a methodology and of how things are processed and i i think that's such a deep lesson both from a micro and a macro level of thinking whether we are talking about policy or government or whether we are talking about our own lives the ability to review our own beliefs to review our own patterns and and that is one of the reasons why i absolutely love podcasts because we can think things through and and not have to define and not have to make something definitive and allow ourselves to explore and experience something when i'm when you when you're writing these books and mapping out people's lives at what kind of measures do you have to take to to not project your subconscious beliefs onto them and onto the book because i find like that must be to me that sounds like one of the most difficult things to do uh is to is to because you must have really learned the skill of realizing that there is no truth there is only both people's perception of the experience would you agree with that or would you say there's always a fact i'm not trying to agree with you on that i don't know that we'll ever get to absolute truth at all times and sometimes we think we get it the truth and we have to revise it but i think that's your load star that's where you set your compass needle which is there's going to be some truth in here somewhere and i just have to listen to all the different sides and look at all the different evidence i mean i've got the patent battle in my book between jennifer doudna and fong zhang well i spend a lot of time looking at evidence people may disagree with my conclusions about that epic battle they're going through over the patent for the use of this gene editing tool but i hope i'm keeping my eye on the ball of trying to get to the truth on this and even though i may miss occasionally i hope i keep enough of an open mind that somebody says well you actually missed this point here's some more facts i'll recalibrate a bit but i grew up in a tradition of journalism that now seems antiquated which is it's not about me it's not about my opinions i got to make sure i keep my opinions as far as possible out of the way except for when i'm forming my opinions based on my reporting and the facts so i'm not trying to say i'm coming at this with a bias that i believe we should gene edit for tay sachs and not sickle cell or something yeah right vice versa i i feel that i've got to be objective and people say well there's no such thing as objectivity i go yeah there are actually things you can test and see what's right and what's wrong and even though we'll never get it absolute truth and we'll never get it being absolutely objective we can always say that's what we're aiming for i think i think that's a really good uh answer to to a to a difficult area to understand when it comes to those skills walter what are the what you do a lot of listening in your line of work when you're listening to people you're observing people you're researching give us your best tip on listening and being present that people can actually use in their life because that's a skill that you've obviously honed and developed to work with some of the most incredible people on the planet how are you listening in such a way that you're truly understanding them i think that's a skill we all need to learn i think a skill that i have if i may be so bold is to claim it is i'm good at getting people to talk you know whether it's a jennifer dowdner or henry kissinger or you know who i wrote about years and years ago or steve jobs where i just sit there sit there by his bed when he was ailing and i can get him to talk and one secret is just let them talk you know you don't have to ask a whole lot of long questions you can just say tell me about it secondly you just have to be truly curious and all the creative people i know have a natural curiosity and i think i'm i may say i'm blessed with it but so is um everybody on the planet we're all blessed with curiosity it's just sometimes we outgrow our wonder years we lose our sense of curiosity we think we know it all and i mean i'm looking i can look out of my window now and the clouds have parted and the sky is blue and i still like leonardo da vinci did like einstein did i'm curious about why the sky is blue and why it gets a darker blue at a certain time and that curiosity causes me to ask questions and sometimes when a journalist asks a question they got a goal in mind they want to play gotcha they're asking a question to try to get a piece of news i try to make sure that every time i ask a question it's a very simple question and i'm asking it because i'm actually curious to know the answer i you know i i think that listening and understanding people to the hardest things that we do but they're things that we have to do every single day and so any tips we can take on that what about tips on asking questions uh you said they're asking simple questions what's probably the most interesting question you've asked someone is it as simple as tell me about it or is there something more to that art of questioning that has allowed you to unlock someone's uh you know their deeper essence through questioning short and simple and sometimes i'll ask a question of why did you do that it could be an inventor could be a hedge fund manager you know somebody created an algorithm to you know beat the market or whatever i'll say why why'd you do that and they'd say okay because i can make money this way because i can i say yeah but why why did you do that and i i like peeling back the onion a bit so that people have to say well i hadn't really thought about deeper motivations or whatever but the only way those questions work is if you're actually generally genuinely curious and um so uh i i was reading recently just because there was this new movie about woody allen and if you're intrepid you can go find it on the internet but when i was at time magazine is when woody allen's suny previn scandal broke or whatever and so i went some reason another you know i'm going to get people to talk he said come on over i'll talk to you and he talked to me for like two hours the middle of the scandal was all breaking and at a certain point i just asked why did you do that you know come on and it was like and he got more and more reflective he at one point said the heart wants what it wants and i just kind of remember that time because it wasn't that i was so smart about asking the questions i didn't go in with smart questions is when i was looking at them i really became curious i really wanted to know excuse me why did you what were you thinking why'd you do that the best part about that answer is that it's available to everyone as you said about curiosity is the skill is simply being curious as you rightly pointed out it's you know everyone can ask that question to their friend their family member a mentor an interesting person we talk a lot about mentors on this podcast and being able to understand the most from our mentors and guides or or teachers and sometimes we think we have to have this phenomenal mind-blowing question to ask that's going to be earth-shattering and the truth is you don't the truth is you just simply want to understand more curiously and i i love that and i want everyone who's listening and watching to to adopt that this week is to ask someone a simple short question in their life so that you can learn something new about them or learn something different about them so i love how how accessible and practical that is yeah not all of us are going to ever have einstein's mental processing power or leonardo da vinci's artistic talent but all of us if we really want to can be just as curious about things about all the wonders around us and that pure curiosity led you know a graduate student in spain to say why do bacteria have these clustered repeated sequences and jennifer doubted to say well what does the rna do in order to get it to the right place to make the cut and that wasn't done because they were trying to make a gene editing tool or trying to make a vaccine they were kind of curious like whoa nature's beautiful let's try to figure it out that that's really resonated with me because same with the other individuals you spoke spoke about and have written about and jennifer doudna too they weren't trying to necessarily solve something for a particular goal it was the curiosity that led to it do you think that that's an approach that we need to encourage more in education in uh in the scientific in both spiritual fields is that something that we're losing is that something you saw more of when you were studying people of the past or is that just a trait that comes along once in a while where you find an incredible icon like this who just thinks completely from a curious place as opposed to a consumer or a creative space of actually creating something tangible i think the most important application of that is in our policy meaning you know government funding university research whatever every now and then you get politicians who balk at research funding by the u.s government which has happened since world war ii and sometimes they make fun of like oh they're studying you know the dna of bacteria why are they doing that and i think part of the message of this book is that basic research curiosity driven research we don't know where it's going to lead but that's where you got to begin and eventually it'll lead to discoveries and those discoveries might lead to inventions and those inventions might be useful when they were you know einstein's uh colleagues were figuring out how do electrons dance on the surface of semiconducting materials and how does quantum theory apply to surface states they weren't doing it to invent the transistor but eventually when they figured out at bell labs theoretical physicists you know like john bardeen and william shockley who understand the quantum surface states of semiconducting materials suddenly have changed the entire world by creating the transistor and then the microchip that's true of my book now which is this adventure to figure out you know how are molecules working in our bodies lenses leads to things like editing tools and vaccines absolutely well terezas and thank you so much for spending time with us today to have this conversation i want to encourage everyone who's deeply fascinated curious and intrigued to go out and get a copy of the code breaker uh it's available right now when you hear this episode and i truly believe that you know walter you you're very humble and modest and i that makes me appreciate you even more but you have a really unique ability to be able to really get into uh people's lives in a really deep and intimate way and take us on a journey through their life in a very 360 hallway i feel like you're great at telling us about the whole person rather than just the part that's often the most popular part and i i really really value your approach and the way you do that uh we end every interview with the final five walter which is a fast five so you have to answer each question in one word or one sentence maximum uh so if you're ready this is your fast five are you ready uh yeah i'm not prepared yeah definitely not prepared okay uh if there's one person you could have dinner with that's no longer with us who would it be leonardo da vinci because he was the person who most wanted to know everything you could know about everything that was knowable and is like whoa tell me about it what what do you think was the most interesting discovery he made through your reset i think his uh most interesting thing he did was connect the arts and the sciences and that's an inspiration for steve jobs who convinced me to write about leonardo da vinci that's what vitruvian man that naked doing the jumping jacks in the circle and square is supposed to symbolize as the connection of art and science and that's why the mona lisa has the most amazing smile it's because he studied optics he studied nerves he studied perspective and he was able to meld art and science to make the greatest painting ever i love that that was only one question by the way i got excited i got curious i got curious so i yeah when when i get curious we can break the rules uh the second the second question who alive would you most love to have dinner with probably elon musk um i've now you know i've actually because of what i do i've been able to have dinner with really interesting people and i admire the hell out of bill gates jeff bezos but i've actually been able to pick their brains before elon i i'd like to figure him out nice what what about what would you ask him what do you think's the most fascinating uh discovery you'd like to make daryl what are you curious about with him i would drill down on battery technology because i often find that truly being curious about something they're curious about is a way to connect absolutely beautiful i love that all right the third question we're only on question three even though i've asked like four questions already uh question number three is uh what's the biggest thing you learned about yourself in the last 12 months i can't remember whether aristotle or plato said it but you know we're a social animal and it's really hard for me to be locked down i was not great during this pandemic i still went out to dinner with friends outside socially distanced but i need to be around other people i recharge my battery by listening to other people beautiful question number four as a prolific author what's your favorite book and if you can't give me one you can have three what are your top three favorite reads in your own life and your own journey the moviegoer by walker percy because it's about like any great book including non-fiction it's about a person goes on a journey and we're all on a journey and that book gets it and speaking of great journeys um moby dick i think uh you could pick huck finn but moby dick is the same sort of thing and so is the odyssey it's a person goes on a journey and moby dick it just grabs me because the detail and the curiosity and the passion and uh third book um um let me pause i've answered too much and i mean i've said too many sentences i love a lot of other books i'm not sure i want to put them in the pantheon with moby dick for me that's fine that's beautiful and the fifth and final i did just read for the you know recently james baldwin i've gotten into and tell me how long the train's been gone my dad wanted me to read it before he died wow and um and i read eddie cloud's book on james baldwin wow that's beautiful thank you and then the fifth and final question if you could create one law that everyone in the world had to follow what would it be be nice be nice i love it uh ever on walter isaacson a new book the code breaker available right now go and grab a copy we will put the link in the description uh please please please go and read about jennifer doudna i promise you you won't regret it uh and and to be honest i i do think this is probably the most uh challenging challenging one for me in in the sense that because it's happening right now uh it presents so many more interesting conversations and questions in in a way that i've never been challenged before so thank you so much for all the work you've done walter uh i remain a fan and supporter and uh really loved meeting you today and appreciate your energy through the screen i look forward to have dinner having dinner with you hopefully one day uh and again i appreciate you so much is there anything else you'd like to share with our audience today that i haven't asked you about you're a great interviewer i think you know all the ways of being curious so thank you and also you're good at following my one rule which is you're very nice if you want even more videos just like this one make sure you subscribe and click on the boxes over here i'm also excited to let you know that you can now get my book think like a monk from thinklikeamonkbook.com check below in the description to make sure you order today

Channel: Jay Shetty Podcast

Views: 5,766

Rating: 4.932961 out of 5

Keywords: Jay Shetty, Jay Shetty Podcast, Jay Shetty Interview, On Purpose Podcast, Jay Shetty Inspiration, Jay Shetty Motivation, Jay Shetty Video, Self help, Self improvement, Self development, entrepreneur, success habits, purpose podcast, Jay Shetty relationships, walter isaacson, walter isaacson steve jobs, walter isaacson interview, life advice, wisdom, success advice, how to find your purpose

Id: opeH-x9q1Gg

Length: 50min 55sec (3055 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 12 2021