- [announcer] funding for overheard with evan smith is provided in part by hillco partners, a texas government affairs consultancy, and by claire and carl stuart. - i'm evan smith, he's the president and ceo of the aspen institute, the former editor of time, former ceo of cnn, and the acclaimed biographer of steve jobs, among other consequential figures. his latest book, already a number one bestseller, is leonardo da vinci. he's walter isaacson, this is overheard. let's be honest, is this about the ability to learn, or is this about the experience of not having been taught properly? how have you avoided what has befallen other nations in africa? you could say that he made his own bed, but you caused him to sleep in it. you saw a problem, and over time, took it on. let's start with the sizzle before we get to the steak. are you gonna run for president? i think i just got an f from you, actually. this is over.

(clapping and cheering) walter isaacson, welcome. - thank you so much. - congratulations, another big success. - well, it's great to be back with you, evan, thank you so much. - and it's a wonderful book, i'm moved to ask, although i think i know the answer, why him? you could write about anybody you could possibly imagine. - and if you could write about anybody, why not leonardo? i'd done books, starting with benjamin franklin, about really smart people, but i began to notice a pattern, which is, being smart doesn't count for much, you have to be creative and innovative. and first ben franklin, einstein, after doing that, i got to do steve jobs, and i realized that it was people who loved everything about the world, who loved art and science, beauty and engineering and technology. those were the people who were the most creative, it's like, here in austin, where you have a concentration of people who love both engineering and creativity and music, and the ultimate of that is leonardo,

and i think the icon of that is the vitruvian man, that's like the symbol of connecting art to science. - well, those people you named were all renaissance men, but this is literally-- - yeah, he is 'the.' - the literal. - the one, defined it! - he was kind of an odd guy. i thought, and i think a lot of people who come to this book, will assume, based on what they learned in school, or heard over the years, or thought they knew, they thought they knew this guy, i discovered how odd he was, but also how companionable he was. - oh, he was really the friendliest guy around, very collegial. and his friends were very diverse, i mean, luca pacioli, the mathematician, and donato bramante, architect, he loved getting smart people around him. - a lot of people considered him their ose friend, or best friend, right? - yeah, i mean, so many people, in their notebooks and diaries say, "my best friend," or, "my close friend leonardo da vinci." - and this was not a common, i mean, my memory of what i knew about michelangelo, for instance,

kind of introvert-- - oh, michelangelo was antisocial, reclusive, didn't get along with leonardo, sort of was disrespectful quite a bit in the public squares when he'd run across leonardo, but leonardo was also a misfit, and this was fine in florence in the 1470s. - well, i wanted to ask you about that, the environment in which he worked and lived, really was a contributor, in some ways, to his success, right? it allowed him to be-- - yeah, you had to be in florence, in the 1470s, with the medici family as great patrons, a lot of tolerance, a lot of diversity, 'cause leonardo gets there as a 12 year old from a village nearby, the village of vinci, of course, and he's gay, left-handed, illegitimate, vegetarian-- - vegetarian, the worst! the worst possible thing! - with all due respect to vegetarians in the audience-- - and onstage. - yeah, and onstage. - it's okay. - although i think he was a vegetarian, but he kept his shopping list in his notebooks, i love his notebooks, and he bought eel and seafood,

so i think was a pescetarian. - he was thinking about straying, exactly. - he strayed occasionally, yes, but, on everything, and yet he was embraced in florence, as he wore his purple and pink tunics around town, just because florence, like cities we know today that are creative cities, austin being, i think, foremost among them, but my hometown of new orleans, i hope has learned from austin. - definitely on that list, right. - or even places like chattanooga, you see this happening, where people are coming in, and they're creative, and they like technology. that's what was happening in florence, so even as a kid, he gets to not only work on the dome that they build on the cathedral in florence, that brunelleschi designed, but he gets to put the copper ball on top, and solder it, when he's an apprentice in one of these shops there, but he's also in charge of the costumes for a lot of pageants and plays, and even the props,

you know the helicopter we think he invented? that was first for one of the plays, where he was just in charge of creating the ingenious devices. so we see how this diversity of creativity helped build leonardo. - the theater work reminds me that he really was good at, or at least was interested enough to get good at a lot of things, right? - exactly, and when he-- - enormously curious about different professions, and about different ills, and he ran toward, rather than away from those challenges. - yeah, i think he was the person in history who tried to learn the most about everything that could possibly be known. in other words, his list in his notebooks, it's, "asks so-and-so how you would measure the sun. "ask so-and-so how they walk on ice in flanders. "what does the tongue of a woodpecker look like?" whoa, i mean, who wakes up one morning and is curious about the tongue of, leonardo! and i think it helps him see patterns across nature, it enriches his life, and there's just nothing he's not,

i mean, he wants to figure out how to square the circle, the ancient mathematical problem, but he's also like, "how would you divert the arno river "to make florence a seaport?" 'cause it's 1492, and vespucci and columbus are sailing around, and he just wants to figure everything out. - you've alluded a couple times to the notebooks, there were some number, more than 7,000, like 7,200 pages? - yeah, right. - of notebooks that were available to you as a biographer. so you can really dive down and, as i've heard you say a couple different times, paper is a terrific preservation mechanism, you put something on paper, and it retains it-- - 500 years later, the operating system still works! - so you got to (chuckles), you got to learn an enormous amount about him, that you presumably did not know. you probably set out on this project thinking, "i know some things, i think he's gonna be "a really interesting guy," but you learned so much more in his own hand. - right, and you see, because paper was also slightly expensive, that he will cram on a notebook page,

so many diverse things. and so you can see his mind just hopping around. - pretty much in real time, right? - right, he'll draw some rivers, and then he'll try to figure out how water swirls when it hits a curve back. but then he'll be drawing curls of hair, and he'll write that the sort of spiral of the hair ishe same ashe water. and so this helps him form his art. his first piece of painting he really does is the river jordan going past the ankles of jesus, in the baptism of christ, that his teacher, verrocchio, is doing, and you just see this scientific beauty of those ripples, but even of the fossil layers under the water. so you think, "oh, wow, i get it." - well, to the point of that painting, and so many of the other things he produced, his attention to detail, his meticulousness, is really a feature of who he was. he was a perfectionist, right? a lot of people through history, in similar situations, have been perfectionists, but that came across

from this book more than anything. - right, i remember when steve jobs, when he had the original macintosh they were doing in 1980, late '83, he held up shipping it, because the circuit board inside wasn't beautiful, and the engineers said, "but nobody will see it, "it's a closed box!" he said, "yes, but you will know." and that's leonardo, too. he only finishes about 15 major paintings, and that's because things like the adoration of the magi, and some others, he just puts aside, 'cause he can't perfect them. - but in other cases, he takes them with him, and he's continually iterating, i mean, i thought about, the perfectionism made me think that he was the first devotee of iteration. that nothing was ever finished. - correct. - and the mona lisa is a great example. - the best example. i mean, he starts painting the mona lisa when he's in late middle age, in 1503, he was born in 1452, so he's in his 50s, and it's for a cloth merchant in florence,

it's his wife, lisa! for 16 years, leonardo carries it around with him. - schlepping it around, right? on mules. - on mules across the alps to get into france, where he's gonna die, and the king of france is his patron. and hundreds of layers of very thin brushstrokes of glaze, as he perfects, for example, the corner of the lips. when he started doing it, he hadn't done all of his anatomy work. but then he dissects a human eye, discovers that the center of the retina sees black and white detail, the corners of the retina sees shadows better, and so he keeps perfecting the smile, so the black and white detail in the edge of the smiles turn down, the shadows and colors turn up, so the smile is interactive, as your eyes wander past it, the smile lights up, and goes off. this is something that was just not just perfectionism, it was connecting science to art. - right, it's remarkable. another thing, again, that i learned,

that i would not have known without this book was his technique, his technique was particular to him, and he perfected it over and over and over, and just, it's remarkable. you call the mona lisa the greatest painting of all time. you believe it. - yeah. and i think, if you've seen the mona lisa, the first time you see it, you may be a bit disappointed, it's sort of, "that's all there is?" and usually, there's like 500 tourists all doing selfies in front of it, so you can hardly see it. but once i learned about the science and the painting of it, and i was given a nice opportunity to see it after hours, and so you can spend some time looking at it, you see that all of his feel for the main issue of his life, which is, what do we know about the cosmos, and how do we fit in? what do we know about creation, and how are we a part of it? and that winding river connected to the roads of civilization, connected almost to the arteries of lisa, and the way her smile is mysterious and elusive, and her eyes are done, you see not just a portrait,

but a narrative, dramatic, emotional, interactive painting. - so for the average person who gets an opportunity after they hear you talking about this to go see the mona lisa, what would you say, it should be the focus, in other words, give us the walter isaacson guide-- - i think that you shouldn't move, because when you move, it changes. there's, i told you about the details of the lips doing it, another thing is he was a white primer coat on the piece of poplar that he does it, but there's, as i say, hundreds of layers of glaze, meaning oil with very little pigment in it, so it builds up, so that means some of the light bounces off the surface, some of it goes into like the 14th layer, or the 20th layer of glaze, some gets all the way back to the primer coat, and comes back at you, so it's luminous from the inside, and he's doing this in shifting waves, so as you walk, not only do the eyes follow you, not only does the smile change, but the whole thing feels almost like a hologram,

in its three-dimensionality, a three-dimensional painting, but also three-dimensional emotion. - okay, well that's good, that's good guidance. everybody assumes that the mona lisa is, if not one of the greats, then the great. there's a different view of the last supper, which is another major work of da vinci's. in fact, you've got, one of the things i like that you did in this book was not assume expertise, but you went seeking expertise, as you're trying to understand this guy, and you talked to art historians, and others who had a perspective, and you actually push back, in one case, on the last supper, you know, that you have an art historian who's critical of the last supper, and you actually have a different perspective, a more positive view of it. - well, kenneth clark, who's a great art historian of the 20th century, and 50, 60 years ago wrote a lot about it, said of the last supper, "it feels a little cold, because it feels "like a moment frozen in time." now, i don't like to push back on the great kenneth clark-- - but having said that. - having said that,

if you look at his notebooks and his theatrical design, you see what he's doing. and this isn't a moment frozen in time. go in and see it, or just look at the reproduction. your eye first goes to the hand of jesus, which is reaching out as you walk in the door. then, you look at his face, and he has said, "one of you shall betray me." and you can look at each of the group of apostles, going out, all 12 of them, to the edge, as the first group is hearing that, and reacting, "is it me, lord?" and then you get to the next verse, it's, "he that dippeth his hand." then you get to judas, and you see he's reaching to dippeth his hand with it, and then it bounces back from the walls, and it gets to the point where jesus is instituting the eucharist, reaching for the bread and wine, so you see a whole narrative of drama, plus, because he was doing stage design for the duke of milan as well, and pageants, it looks like a stage set, you look at the walls, and they come in a little too fast,

i mean, he knows perspective, but he exaggerates it a bit, just like if you were on this stage and there was a play, the scenery on each side would be coming in at a bit of an angle, and the table would be tilted a bit so you could see what's on it. so all of this, and the dramatic gestures, all of this is a theater producer and a scientist, and somebody who knows the math of perspective. - conscious and deliberate. - conscious and deliberate, and taking a long, and the problem with the painting is he takes a very long time to do it, because it's so difficult to get the drama right, and the perspective, even the light on the painting, if you walk into the refractory, it comes from a window, a real window, on the refractory, and you look at the shadows on the painting, and it's actually coming from that window. so it's a hard thing to do. if you're doing a fresco, you're supposed to paint on wet plaster, and you have to do it fast, before the plaster dries, each part of it. leonardo took forever, tiny brushstrokes, and that's why it flaked off after a while.

- but so consistent with everything we know about him, the way he works, the style. you held up the vitruvian man. this, i would actually submit, maybe, the most iconic image associated with da vinci, more even than the mona lisa. what is the significance of this, and what should we take from this? - there are many things to say, we'll start with the fact that we said how collegial he was, i think everybody thinks he just did that drawing one day. he did it with friends. they were all into church design, they were trying to make the milan cathedral, which is a grotesque monstrosity, it was a simple tower, they weren't allowed to, so they go to pavia, and they have gone to see a manuscript that vitruvius, the ancient architect had written, which says that the proportions of a church should mirror the proportions of a man. and leonardo, being a total geek, does hundreds of proportions, chin to the lip, gets it all perfect. and all of 'em do this drawing, they're like three different friends, they're doing five or six versions,

to try to illustrate this, and then leonardo does it. it's a different class, because it's scientifically perfect, it's also unnecessarily beautiful. everybody else is doing little stick figures, he's doing a truly gorgeous guy. and as you'll see in my book, one of his friends, donato bramante, did a painting of the two of 'em together, and when you look at this intense stare, and the curly hair, and the well-proportioned body, as bramante called it, you realize it's a self-portrait. and so here's leonardo standing spread eagle, naked, on the earth, in the cosmos, saying, "how do we fit into creation?" it's a spiritual, scientific, and artistic-- - and most people have no idea how significant it is. - yeah, and it's just a wonderful narrative chapter, i think, if i may say so, the narrative tale. - oh, you may say it. - no, i mean, it wasn't this way, i mean, just discovering from his notebooks and the notebooks of his friends, the narrative tale of how they all went and did this,

this didn't just pop up, this is amazing. - so back on the notebooks, i wanna talk a little bit about the process here, so you're a biographer of consequential figures, some modern and some historical. the process of writing a major biography of a consequential figure, obviously changes based on when they lived, and what material is available. now, we've said actually, weirdly, although you might think it would be harder to write a biographer of leonardo da vinci than steve jobs, steve jobs being a contemporary figure, and the assumption is that there's all kinds of primary source material available, you actually have the opposite view! - right, well, when steve jobs, i got so much time to talk to him, so if he's telling me about the original ipad, he'll talk about how he did what's called the chamfers and curves, to lift, i mean, he'd go on for hours, i knew more about that than i knew about my own life, how he figured that. on the other hand, when i asked steve jobs, let's get the memos from the 1990s, when you were fighting with apple, they were all on a next computer,

that computer he did in between his stints in apple. and they couldn't, even with techies, you couldn't get the memo, they couldn't get the emails, that sort of thing. so that's when i say paper's a good technology, so we have more notebook pages from him than you would from most people, and people haven't sort of dived into the notebooks, they're all scattered all over the world, in fun places, i may say, you get to go to venice and florence-- - having traveled to those fun places, right? - yeah, exactly. but to say, okay, i'm not just gonna base a book on his 15 painting masterpieces. i'm gonna just watch month by month, as he writes his to-do list, his shopping list, his attempts to draw people that he sees in the park that might be good for the last supper, and say, how does it fit together? - so generally speaking, now that we're past the point, presumably, of needing to access files on a next computer, will future biographers of figures from this era have it easier, because there's gonna be a historical record that's in the cloud,

or wherever else-- - that's a great question. my very first book, i did when i was just out of college with a friend, was called the wise men. and it was in the '50s, and robert lovett and john mccloy, who are two of the, would write twice a day, letters to each other. and then suddenly in 1958, a tiny invention happens, which is direct long-distance dialing, and suddenly, instead of, in the files, these letters, you get phoned, "call me about vietnam," and you go, so you lose the record. now, fortunately for us historians, john kennedy, lbj, and all the way through nixon, often taped themselves. but nixon blew that for us, and people didn't tape. and so likewise, i would hope somewhere, even like in presidential libraries here in austin, that people would be saving every myspace and facebook and twitter-- - we'll always have the trump tweets, right? - yeah, we'll always have the trump tweets, but myspace has disaeared,

when george w. bush was, you know, and you have the library. - i'm not sure, was he on myspace? i'm not actually sure. - well, i just, so many people were, people were posting their thoughts on social networks that have disappeared. - the problem with technology is that we assume there's permanence that is not necessarily built into it. let me ask you about, toggle over from this extraordinary book and the pursuit of understanding people like these guys. you have, and i have such a admiration for this, you have done a masterful job at the aspen institute of convening public conversations, and of unlocking civic engagement. - by the way, you've done that here in texas, so thank you, evan. - on a small level. - nope, texas is not small. - thank you. but i really believe that the power of the public conversation is something that more people need to understand and appreciate, and i just wonder if you would reflect on that, you're getting ready to pass the baton to an as-yet-unnamed successor at aspen, but you've done a lot of work in trying to tend to this great institution, and to make sure-- - well, i will go back to social media, and twitter and all.

when you're following a twitter feed, 1/2 the people are anonymous, and 1/4 are trolls, and people are saying horrible, nasty things. and in a public space, a table like this, a room like this, an aspen ideas festival, people are there talking in the flesh, and it actually makes a more civil dialog, because you're not only not anonymous, you're actually seeing the person you're talking to, and we could solve most problems in this country, if reasonable people got together, and had-- - leave weapons at the door, right? - leave weapons at the door, and had civil discussions. - how do we make that available to the masses? because as much as i accept everything you've said, there is a version of aspen, and we have the same problem here in texas, where it's elites talking to elites. when the fact is, it's regular people who have come to distrust institutions, distrust government, distrust the media, distrust people in power, the establishment, and they're checking out. so how do we bring them back into the conversation? - well, i think, at the aspen institute,

i hope the next phase, and i hope to be involved, when they pick my successor, we've already talked to the people who might be it, is that there should be aspen institutes in every town in america. i don't mean chicago or los angeles, but i mean every, plano, to oklahoma city, to des moines, to places where people of good faith, we have rotary clubs, we have texas tribune-type meetings, but, and maybe partner with local, like the texas tribune, and say, why doesn't every town have its own local aspen run by its own local people, try to get a group of, in each place, by people from each party, people from each class or race or whatever, and say, "we're going to be the center of dialog in our little town." - well, public squares have disappeared, the disappearance of the newspaper is a fact of life in a lot of communities, is the last safe space, before that became a pejorative phrase, the last place.

- right, right, and there were even, it's before radio became talk radio, and everybody went to their own end of the talk radio dial. before the blogosphere became left and right and everybody went to their own corner of the blogosphere, we used to have common-ground media. - not anymore. - right. and we could have common-ground discussions again, and shows like this do it, pbs does it, there are places, but-- - not enough. - not enough, and everything from the technology of the media, to the politics of gerrymandering, to 20 others factors you can name right off the top of your head, have served to polarize the dialog, and so now we need people of good faith, and even my books, that's what this book is about, this is leonardo collaborative, ben franklin, he started the leather apron club, this was the original type of aspen, well, all the philadelphia who worked on market street would get together and figure out issues.

and they would do science, too! on ben franklin's list of what to talk about each week, it was, why does condensation form on the-- - we can't even agree on that! - right! you can start with science, which has also become politicized, and say, "let's build up "on certain things that we're going to agree upon," and also, let's just remain curious. i love the fact that ben franklin decided to have a discussion of why does condensation form. i love it that leonardo put in his notebook, why is the sky blue, and then consulted a whole lot of people to figure out how light scatters with water vapor. these are the questions that we asked during our wonder years, and we've lost our ability to ask innocent questions again. - we have about a minute left, you're going back to new orleans. - it's like the austin of louisiana. - you're kinda back, so you're gonna teach at tulane. - i'm gonna teach at tulane. i do believe in a time of polarized discourse, part of the problem is people sometimes leave

their homes, leave their communities, become a part of coastal elites. at a certain point in life, you oughta go home. for you, it's easy. - and aspen, while not on the coast, is sort of a coastal-- - oh yeah, in fact, we're based in washington despite our wonderful name, and so, cathy, my wife and i, decided, you know, it's about time to go home. i've joined the city planning commission, she's joined the big foundation there. it's like, alright, let's work in a creative place that's got its challenges, and maybe we can just have some, and satisfaction. - plus, the food's good. - and the music! now, we could have another show, willie nelson versus louis armstrong, frenchmen street versus austin city limits. - that will be the next show. - and the food. - i wish you great success, everything you've done has been so great, and i hope it continues. - evan, thanks. - walter isaacson, thank you so much. pleasure. (clapping) - [announcer] we'd love to have you join us in the studio.

visit our website at klru.org/overheard to find invitations to interviews, q&as with our audience and guests, and an archive of past episodes. - i like to each week at least, say, of the people i disagree with in the public sphere, what have they proposed that i actually deeply agree with, and yet i'm kinda reacting against it, because it's them who proposed it. i think if politicians did that, they would find more common ground. - [announcer] funding for overheard with evan smith is provided in part by hillco partners, a texas government affairs consultancy, and by claire and carl stuart.

[ ♪ ] hello, and welcome. i'm kamla. on today's show, we are going to talk about a very different aspect of silicon valley. we're going to take you back to the 19th and the 20th century and talk about a time when silicon valley, or santa clara valley, which is one of the counties that silicon valley consists of, was famous for its fruits and wines. at one point, santa clara valley was known as "the garden spot of the world." and california is "the nation's great vineyard," according to charles sullivan, a very well-known historian of wine and wineries in california. so today with me is vic vanni of solis winery. he is from santa clara, or silicon valley actually, right? whole life you gw up here?