#157 The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

**David Senra** (0:00)
I want to tell you about a one time only limited event that I don't think you're going to want to miss. I am doing a live show with Patrick O'Shaughnessy from the Invest Like the Best podcast in New York City on October 19th. Patrick has interviewed over 300 of the world's best investors and founders for his podcast. I've read over 300 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs for my podcast. We'll be talking about what we learned from seven years of podcasting, sharing our favorite ideas and stories, and doing a live Q&A. There will also be special event-only swag. If you live in New York City, I think it's a no-brainer. But if not, I think it's a great excuse to fly in. I've already heard from a bunch of people that bought tickets. They're flying in from other cities. Some people are flying in from other countries. That's setting the bar really high, so I will have at least four shots of espresso or four energy drinks before or during the show so we can make it a night that you'll never forget. If you're interested in attending this unique live event, I will leave a link down below. I highly recommend you get your tickets today, and I hope I get to see you in New York on October 19th. The computer and the internet are among the most important inventions of our era, but few people know who created them. They were not conjured up in a garage by a solo inventor, suitable to be singled out on a magazine cover, or put into a pantheon with Edison, Bell, or Morse.
Instead, most of the innovations of the digital age were done collaboratively.
There were a lot of fascinating people involved. Some ingenious, and a few even geniuses.
This is the story of those pioneers, hackers, inventors, and entrepreneurs. Who they were, how their minds worked, and what made them so creative. The collaboration that created the digital age was not just among peers, but also between generations.
Ideas were handed off from one cohort of innovators to the next.
I was struck by how the truest creativity of the digital age came from those who were able to connect the arts and the sciences.
They believed that beauty mattered.
I always thought of myself as a humanities person as a kid, but I liked electronics, Steve Jobs told me when I embarked on his biography.
Then I read something that one of my heroes, Edwin Land of Polaroid, said about the importance of people who could stand at the intersection of humanities and sciences.
And I decided that's what I wanted to do.
The people who were comfortable at this humanities-technology intersection helped to create the human-machine symbiosis that is the core of this story. Like many aspects of the digital age, this idea that innovation resides where arts and scientists connect is not new.
Leonardo da Vinci was the exemplar of the creativity that flourishes when the humanities and sciences interact.
When Einstein was stymied while working out general relativity, he would pull out his violin and play Mozart until he could reconnect to what he called the Harmony of the Spears. When it comes to computers, there is one other historical figure not well known who embodied the combination of the arts and sciences. Like her famous father, she understood the romance of poetry.
Unlike him, she also saw the romance of math and machinery. And that is where our story begins.
That was an excerpt from the introduction of the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is The Innovators, How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution, and it was written by Walter Isaacson. So let me tell you before I jump into the book, let me tell you how I found this book. So a few weeks ago, I read the book Invent and Wander, the collected writings of Jeff Bezos. The vast majority of that book is just written directly by Jeff Bezos, right? And but the introduction is written by Walter Isaacson. It's a fairly long introduction. And he's comparing and contrasting Jeff Bezos with other historical figures. So Isaacson has done a bunch of biographies that I actually did podcasts on. So I did his podcast on his book by Benjamin Franklin, American Life. Steve Jobs, he wrote probably the most famous biography of Steve Jobs. And I also did his podcast on his biography of Leonardo da Vinci. So in that introduction, Invent and Wonder, he's comparing Jeff Bezos to all these other people. And he also compares it to this person I don't recall. And it was this person named Ada Lovelace.