Interview– Lawrence Goldstone
“Glenn Curtiss was more important to modern flight than the Wright brothers,” says this week's guest, Lawrence Goldstone, the award-winning author (or co-author with his wife Nancy) of more than twenty books.
We talk about Glenn Curtiss, the Wrights brothers and early flight; Lefty Gomez stopping the 1937 World Series to watch a plane, and the daredevil Lincoln Beachey. We also talk about what it means to have a healthy disrespect for authority; law, language, and ideals; justice, and why "wisdom is the willingness to look at things differently.”
Here we focus mainly on this transportation trilogy--
Birdmen: The Wrights Brothers, Glenn Curtiss, and the Battle to Control the Skies.
Drive! Henry Ford, George Selden, and the Race to Invent the Auto Age
Going-Deep John Holland and the Invention of the Attack Submarine.
Find his other books on his website.
Listen to the full episode :
Transcript:
1LGVidPhotAudioLawrence Goldstone on FM
Andrea Hiott: [00:00:00] Hey, everybody. I'm so glad you're here. Today's conversation is with a really amazing writer named Lawrence Goldstone. He actually just won the 2023 Carter G Woodson book award for days of infamy. He writes a lot about legal issues and constitutional law, but he also has written a trilogy about transportation.
One is called Birdmen, and it's about Glenn Curtis and the Wrights brothers and their incredible feud. It's going to help you rethink what you might know about the first airplanes. He also wrote a book called Drive about Henry Ford, which takes us to a very different view of Henry Ford. He [00:01:00] actually didn't create or invent a lot of the things we attribute to him, such as the And the other one is called Going Deep, and it's about the earliest submarine technology.
They're all really easy, fast reads, wonderful books that give you so much knowledge. Uh, this conversation we focused mostly on the Glenn Curtis versus the Wright brothers and the one about Henry Ford called Drive. We talk about, a lot about the first people working in the airplanes, um, who were out sort of daredevils, taking all these chances and basically also helping us improve technology.
And we just think about the role those people play and what it means and who gets remembered and who gets forgotten. And we talk about this time period when all these things like the airplane, the submarine, the car were all coming into existence, the end of the 19th century, beginning of 20th. It's kind of a watershed moment, uh, which we may be living through another one now when it comes to transportation.
This is just a really great conversation about... [00:02:00] Everything from why Steve Jobs didn't invent anything to why Harriet Quimby is one of the most amazing pilots that no one's ever heard of. Um, how to develop more flow and trust if edge working in business is really like edge working in sports. We talk about the right balance in a society and the differences between law and language and how they can't be separated.
And we talk about the very first taxis in New York. in 1899 and how they were all electric. So join us for a great conversation and check out Lawrence Goldstone's books. You won't be sorry that you did. They're really good reads.
Welcome Lawrence. It's so nice to see you. Thanks for being here on Forever Motor. So this is a podcast about what moves us and the ways we move. So what's an early memory that you have of being moved?
Lawrence Goldstone: Well, I've got a bunch. I grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and at the [00:03:00] time I grew up, there was, they still have the electric power trolleys.
And I just was totally fascinated and they, the tracks ran down the middle of the street. And so I remember going on those trolleys with my father and I was little, but there was something, there was a fascination in the rods and the sparks that would come off the cables that were above. And it was something that just drew me to that.
And more than being in a car or a bus or a subway, but the sense of motion when you're small and growing up is, is enormous. And it gives you this sense of the world being just this much bigger place. Then the little block that you live on. So I've got a lot of memories of, of going places, even on the subway, going to Coney Island and, and [00:04:00] I, there was just this, this great wonder about being able to go from one place to another, which actually, when I got older, didn't leave me, it just.
It went in different directions and I still love to travel and wants to see new places and do new stuff. So I think that's a phenomena, a phenomena that's common to us all, where just this idea of change of scenery becomes a source of total fascination. Yeah,
Andrea Hiott: sitting on the electric tram, do you remember what it felt like to actually be on
Lawrence Goldstone: that?
Oh, yeah. I mean, it was bumpy, first of all, because it's going on tracks. So you feel this bump in the vibration and you can hear it, the sound of the cable. So there was this total sensory experience where you drop into being on the trolley and it goes beyond going from one place to another. And it's the going.
that is a separate [00:05:00] fascination from where you're going. It really kind of fills you up. It wasn't visual. It was visual to a point, obviously. But it was mostly how it
Andrea Hiott: felt. Feeling yourself moving with it. It's funny about those electric trams. They used to be in so many cities, but they just all disappeared at some point, I guess.
Lawrence Goldstone: Well, they disappeared because they took up too much of the street. The tracks have to run down the middle of the street and the people have to walk into the street to get on and off. And when cars became more ubiquitous, then. Everything was stopping so the people could walk on and off where a bus can pull into the curb and then pull out into traffic, but they said, I think they still have them in some places and original when batteries when battery technology in the 18 eighties or 18 nineties when the storage battery was perfected, they started with buses.
I think it was in Philadelphia with these massive array of batteries [00:06:00] On the bus, and so there were no overhead cables, but it was just too heavy and the battery life wasn't good enough. So that was ultimately replaced by internal combustion.
Andrea Hiott: That's interesting. I didn't know that about the batteries.
Yeah, so let's talk a little bit about how you moved after from your childhood into becoming an adult. Did you study, uh, law?
Lawrence Goldstone: Nope, never studied law. And, and... Calling me an adult, I think is something I've done everything I graduated. I was very young when I graduated high school, went off to university of Michigan, I was not ready for college, dropped out, worked, went back.
undergrad, met a professor as an undergrad who was inspiring. So I went to graduate school in political science at the new school. I got a PhD and what I did was it always struck me that there is this side of jurisprudence, [00:07:00] which is purely political, particularly in the United States, particularly in the Supreme court.
And so I went and I looked at the constitutional convention and I said, this is not. This is a meeting. I realize that this is kind of like a business meeting. These are, this is not a meeting of latter day Athenians, you know, a colloquial on political theory. This was hard headed negotiation by groups of people and sometimes individuals who had specific needs.
And that's why they met, and they were not going to leave without a certain minimum. So, it struck me that if you look at something from a slightly different angle, and this professor that I like so much said to me, education is learning how to look at things differently. And I always think, I think that wisdom is willingness to look at things differently.
So that's, that's sort of the approach I
Andrea Hiott: took. That makes sense with the books you've written. Can you tell the [00:08:00] story that about your, what your mother told you about, uh, when you came, I think a teacher called her. This is totally,
Lawrence Goldstone: this is totally true, and people don't believe it, but it actually happened.
I was in second grade at PS 230 in Brooklyn, and my mother was called in yet again to see the principal, Mr. Messinger, by the way, and I was called down into the hall and Mr. Messinger looked at my mother and said, Mrs. Goldstone, your son has no respect for authority. My mother looked down at me and said, well, what about that, Larry?
And I said, he doesn't mean respect. He means courtesy. You can demand courtesy, but you have to earn respect. And the principle was. Somewhat speechless, my mother laughed, and I was returned to the classroom with the healthy disrespect for authority, which has never left me. [00:09:00] Justice
Andrea Hiott: has remained a theme that's important to you, hasn't
Lawrence Goldstone: it?
Yes, yes. Justice, I've written a lot of books about equal rights and the Constitution and law, and I'm friends with Skip Gates, Henry Louis Gates. And he said, you know, how come, you know, you're always writing about black people, you know, white guy. And I said, I have always hated bullies. I hate them in the schoolyard.
I hate them in Congress. I hate them on the bench. I hate bullies. who are conservative, or I hate bullies who are liberal. I just, there is something I find incredibly offensive about not being willing to fight fair. So, yes, the theme is justice, but it is also a theme of people with power trying to use that power to suppress others.
That's a common theme in, say, Birdman, or Drive, or Going Deep, which is about submarine technology. Yeah, that is the common theme throughout all of my work. It is. [00:10:00] People who are trying to push other people around.
Andrea Hiott: You just mentioned, um, going to Birdman and Drive, which are all about different forms of transportation, flight, the automobile, and the submarine, which emerged around the same time, end of the 19th century.
So how did you get interested in the innovation of this time period? And maybe you could just tell us a little bit about how those books came together. We, we are already seeing how they are similar, but maybe we could unpack that just a little bit.
Lawrence Goldstone: Sure. My daughter had a piano teacher named Vernona Gomez, and Vernona used to sweep in every Sunday, dressed like Loretta Young, coming out, dressed perfectly.
Ramrod posture, she was about 5'10 she was almost 70 at the time, and she would come in and teach my daughter piano. And one day she comes in wearing a Yankee cap, a New York Yankee cap, to one of the [00:11:00] concerts. I said, what's she doing with the Yankee cap? And the guy turns her, another parent turns around and says, don't you know who that is?
She's Lefty Gomez's daughter. And Lefty Gomez is a famous New York Yankee Hall of Fame baseball pitcher known as Goofy. So one day One day, Vernota barges in the house on a Sunday, which is a day that Emily was not supposed to be taking piano lessons, and said, I want to know how to write a book. I said, well, she said, I've done 355 interviews with all my father's friends, and I want to write a book about his life.
And I said, okay, and then I looked at the material and it was unbelievable. Lefty was a fascinating guy. He's very much like the sports writer, Ringo Ardner. He was anything but dumb, really smart, incisive wit. We don't have time, but I can tell you great stories. So I start with her and she's a little bit difficult to get weird, close to.
And I said, I'll help you write the proposal. [00:12:00] And then you can take it from there. And writes the proposal. My agent loves it. My agent said, You gotta write the book. You know so much about baseball. My wife said, you gotta write the book. You know so much about baseball. My kid said, don't do it, Dad. Now, Lefty Gomez was famous for his love of airplanes.
And he stopped, in 1937, in a World Series game, he stopped pitching to watch an airplane fly overhead. He was very famous in all the papers. And Lefty got his love of flying. Lefty was born in 1909, I think. And he got his love of flying. At the San Francisco World's Fair in 1915, watching the greatest flyer of the time, a man named Lincoln Beachy.
And I had never heard of Lincoln Beachy. And I looked up Lincoln Beachy. And Lincoln Beachy, the things Lincoln Beachy did were You would say they were impossible, except they were watched by hundreds of thousands of people. More people knew who [00:13:00] Lincoln Beachy was than who Woodrow Wilson was. And Woodrow Wilson was president.
And I said, wow, this is really fascinating. And then I got into the other exhibition flyers of which Beachy was clearly the best. I mean, he had this thing called the dip of death. He would go 5, 000 feet in the air, go straight down until he was a couple of feet 100 feet off the ground and then pull it out perfectly.
Two dozen people at least died trying to do a beachy, as they called it. So this became fascinating. Then I looked at the exhibition flyers and they had started almost when flight became more or less perfected, which is. And I kind of 1907, 1908, and I said, wow, this is a great story. And I was going to pitch a book called The Exhibitionists, but then I realized that the story can't, you can't really tell the story of the exhibition flyers without telling the story of early flight.
And that got me [00:14:00] into the whole evolution of flight and the Wright brothers and Glenn Curtis. And it hit my theme because the Wright brothers tried to bully everybody. You know, after, just to quick, I might get into in more detail, but after they flew successfully in 1903, which was a brilliant feat. They didn't fly publicly, they went home, they didn't announce it, they got themselves a patent lawyer, trying to squeeze everyone out, and ultimately Glenn Curtiss who was a much better innovator, although he didn't solve the initial problem, but he solved almost every problem after that.
For example, Glenn Curtiss was the first person to figure out how to land an airplane on the deck of a ship. Oh, yeah.
Andrea Hiott: I love that story in Birdman. He put
Lawrence Goldstone: He put
sandbags, sandbags on both sides of the ship with ropes running across and a hook on the bottom of the plane, a tail hook, which they still use. And the plane landed and hit the sandbags one after [00:15:00] and came to a stop.
So Curtis Curtiss started a steering wheel on the plane. Ailerons, the Wright Brothers technology was dead end. So I'm looking and I realized that Glenn Curtiss nobody really talks about, and the Air and Space Museum gives him like a minor role, Glenn Curtiss was more important to modern flight than the Wright Brothers, even though Wilbur Wright was brilliant and wing warping, and so that immediately The no respect for authority, don't like bullies.
So I looked in and researched the whole story. So the story is the Wright brothers. It's Glenn Curtis, and it's also the exhibition flyers. And I, I had pretty much, and Lincoln Beach, he died in a crash. He died of drowning because he was trying to do the dip of death in a model plane with the new miracle metal, which was aluminum, which was strong, except it folded and.
He went, crashed into San Francisco Bay. In fact, [00:16:00] um, he crashed about a week after Lefty saw him as a six year old child. Oh,
Andrea Hiott: wow. That's an
Lawrence Goldstone: interesting intersection. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, well, that happens all the time in history, which is why it's so cool. Yeah. And it's exciting. So that's what got me going.
And then I realized that automobile technology came about at the same time. Some of the same people were involved. And that had a similar story with... Henry Ford and a series of other people. And then I looked into submarines, which were also perfected about the same time. And that had the same kind of theme and the same kind of intersections.
So it was just a natural trilogy to write on these three, because that period at the end of the 19th century, early 20th century, you know, we think we're in innovative technology now. We got the airplane. We got the submarine. We got caught with the automobile. We got refrigeration, commercial use of [00:17:00] electricity, radio, Freud's theory of the unconscious mind, Einstein's relativity, the discovery of the electron.
So that, to me, that period of innovation was every bit as significant as the one we're in now, maybe more so. Although these, these periods, these watershed periods definitely changes.
Andrea Hiott: Absolutely. It's fascinating to think of that time period and how many things were going on at once. Much less potential communication.
Of course, there was a lot of communication, but it's really almost hard to get your head around how all that could have been coming out at once. Well, it leads,
Lawrence Goldstone: you know, it's interesting because it comes out at once because things lead to other things. You can't just connect it all. Yeah. I mean, again, we're talking, which is why I like breadth.
There are things should be analyzed in the abstract, the really smart people to me, the essence of intelligence is [00:18:00] simplicity, the really smart people. That's why Einstein's my God. You know, you look, Einstein will tell you, you'll read one of Einstein's thought experiments and go, Oh, yeah, I knew that. And you and you didn't.
You know, the idea that if you're on a shore and someone's in a boat passing by and you have no sense of frame of reference, who's moving? Exactly. Yeah. Right? And so, so this whole notion that Einstein gets you to think in terms of simplicity, where people who are actually not as brilliant, They, they deal in complexity.
So all of this, the really smart people and, and there are many in every generation look and get an idea. And the idea is always simple and then expands out. So the notion that all of this stuff happens at the same time is that it's not far fetched. Because once the simple ideas, once the [00:19:00] axioms are established, then there's all sorts of permutations that go with it, and people apply it in all sorts of different places, which we see happening now.
AI, for example, where people have, it's branching out in all of them productive. And the other part of AI which is interesting to me is that AI is limited. It ain't creative. You know, it's based on what we put into creative. That's right. And nobody is thinking in terms of the lack of creativity, but somebody will.
And then you will move that step further.
Andrea Hiott: There's so much in there that's interesting that I want to dig into, but first I guess we should just talk maybe about, just go back to the Birdmen for a second and Wright Brothers and Curtis. Um, maybe that'll kind of lead us into the rest of it. It's interesting that you say they were bullies because I think a lot of us [00:20:00] grow up thinking they were just these.
Almost a centric sort of heroes, and we don't hear anything about all the litigation and all the secretive, strange stuff. Almost everything that's in your book was new to me in that regard. Why do you think that story has never been told?
Lawrence Goldstone: Well, there's a couple of reasons. Um, one is that the Wright brothers, now Wilbur died in 1912, and Wilbur was a brilliant, instinctive scientist.
Orville, on the other hand, was a good technician, but he was the little brother in lots of other ways. And Orville was obsessed with Wilbur's legacy and his own legacy. And so he spent a lot of time trying to make sure that the Wright brothers were remembered as the people who started flight. And there was litigation, a patent suit, as you know, but even afterwards, Orville made a deal with the Smithsonian that in order to get the original right flyer, they had to credit Wilbur.
So it [00:21:00] is the problem with the Wright brothers is that they. We see this a lot in history where someone gets a reputation for something and that something dominates and you don't look anywhere else. Harvey Weinstein did a room with a view. Wow, Harvey Weinstein, that's brilliant. All of a sudden, Harvey Weinstein turns out.
To be something else. Bill Cosby turns out to be something else. Now these, this is criminal stuff, but the principle is the same. Nobody thinks anymore about the Bill Cosby show and the whole family aspect of it, but for a while that's all they thought about. People tend to focus in, so we focus in on the Wright Brothers and that December.
1903 flight and the iconic picture and we say the Wright Brothers invented the airplane. Well, no, the Wright [00:22:00] Brothers were the first to have controlled powered flight. That was with a person on it. There were other flights that were not controlled. Gustav Whitehead, he was a person at Exxon Galladay did wing warping, which was the Wright brothers technology in an unmanned flight.
But from there, there is not a single thing that the Wright brothers did. That has anything to do with modern aviation. They didn't, they, they launched their plane, you know, for a while they had a derrick, and they would drop a sandbag, would go and that would power the, the airplane down a track and take off.
They had no sense of how to do any of this. Their engine was not particularly strong. And, when the competition started going, and the Wright Brothers tried to be part of the air shows and part of this whole phenomenon, they Their guy, their pilots, they were dying [00:23:00] because the right that this is not
Andrea Hiott: a spectacular part of your book to when he
Lawrence Goldstone: does that and Wilbur, what happened with Wilbur was in 1909 they took into these investors with huge amounts of money.
And the idea was that Wilbur should go back to Dayton and they built him a factory which. And he was supposed to innovate and Wilbur refused. He spent the last three years of his life micromanaging the patency. And he was particularly inept as a businessman, particularly inept as a legal advisor. But this is what he wanted to do because he was obsessed.
So that all drops away. And all we have is that iconic 1903 picture. And Wilbur Wright invented the airplane, because most people are drawn to simple truths, and the rest of the story just gets buried.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, they did kind of get what they wanted at the end of the day. Uh,
Lawrence Goldstone: no. They would never have gotten what they wanted.
Andrea Hiott: Which was full payment for every airplane [00:24:00] ever made. You
Lawrence Goldstone: know, they were, yeah, now it could have been, they were very deeply religious in a very fundamental Protestant sect. And, you know, that could have been a motivation. The whole Calvinist idea that, you know, for the greater glory of God, it might've just been that they were personally, neither of them ever got married.
Neither of them ever had a girlfriend. Whatever their motives were, they were insular, they were clannish, and they were obsessed. And that obsession got them into the air, and then it kept them from going any further.
Andrea Hiott: Right. And what you show in a wonderful way in the book is how while they were doing this, sort of just in hiding almost, trying to sell...
These airplanes to the military and basically not showing their airplanes at all, which was very weird to me that they could even do that. In the meantime, of course, as you were saying, like these ideas are out there and everyone's working and [00:25:00] trying to actually do something new with this. Maybe you can tell us a little bit about what's going on as they're holed up in hiding, even though they've had the first flight.
Now,
Lawrence Goldstone: remember, nobody knew about the first flight. So all this, all of these people, Henri Florman and, uh, Alberto Santos Demont, these are people who are experimenting independently, and Glenn Curtis eventually. Independently of what the Wright Brothers were doing, because they didn't know about the Wright Brothers.
When the Wright Brothers flew it, it was secret, they didn't publicize it, they went home. The first legitimate description of the Wright Flyer was in a bee, a bee journal, because a beekeeper happened to see them testing their airplane in Huffman Prairie, I think in 1905. So, all of these people experimenting, were experimenting with the same ideas.
That the Wright brothers had access and ultimately they figured out the big [00:26:00] problem was that all the early designs and the wings meet the fuselage. It wasn't really a fuselage meet the body of the airplane in a in a V. , which is called the dihedral because that can help you get off the ground, but you can't control it.
So you basically either fly in a straight line or corkscrew into the ground and crash. The brilliance of the Wright brothers was that you put it in a an aned, which makes the plane less easy to control. Inherently, but then you put these attachments on and if you bend the wings in opposite directions, you can control it and you can actually turn.
So the right, that's why they're the first for controlled power flight. There, the right flyer could turn. What Glenn Curtis Developed were ailerons, which is exactly what we have now, which are little attachments on the back of the wing. You don't have to [00:27:00] work the whole way. The problem with the Wright Brothers technology is you can't work a metal way because their wings are fabric and wood, so you can work fabric and wood, but you can't work metal and Curtis is the aileron gave them the power to them.
Use stronger materials in the wing and still achieve a turn. Now, these were developed independently of what the Wright Brothers were doing because nobody knew. In fact, the Wright Brothers only flew publicly in 1908, um, because other people were catching up.
Andrea Hiott: So in this, in the meantime, based on the same research the Wright brothers had used, which no one really knew about it, others were also advancing, and with Chanute and all of these...
Give you an
Lawrence Goldstone: idea, back, back in the, you know, back in, in Gutenberg's day, tons of people were experimenting and trying to figure out... How to print with movable type. Didn't invent printing. There were tons of people trying to figure it out. But Gutenberg was the one who solved the [00:28:00] problem. He developed the ink with, with linseed oil and lamp black.
And he was the one who solved the problem first. But if Gutenberg had not solved the problem, somebody else would have. That's the whole point. And that's what we've got going here now. You know, Bill Gates didn't, didn't invent. Um, MS DOS, somebody, I think his name was Kelly, invented it and Gates either bought it for cheap or didn't buy it, didn't pay for anything for it, and we'll get with that with Henry Ford too, there are people who see the potential of ideas.
And run with them. And then there are people who have ideas and they are rarely the same. In fact, most of the people who have ideas have proven to be inept at moving them forward in a commercial or scientific way. And most of the people who do that. Aren't brilliant idea people, although like Henry Ford and Steve Jobs, they get credit for ideas, [00:29:00] other people's ideas because they brought them into the public consciousness.
Yeah.
Andrea Hiott: Maybe this is a good time to talk about Ford a little, but I also want to come back eventually to talk about all these other people like, uh, Beachy and so on, who are doing this real experimentation in the field, who also are the reason for a lot of innovation in a way, but also get left behind. But first let's just talk a little bit about, so then you, you wrote drive.
Kind of right after Birdman. And this is similar in a way, isn't it? With the bully, the court case. Maybe I'll let you unpack it a little bit. Mm hmm.
Lawrence Goldstone: Well, Ford invented nothing. He did not invent the assembly line. He did not invent the eight hour day. He did not invent the automobile. He did not invent anything.
But. He was brilliant, like Steve Jobs. He was brilliant in hiring and using people to get tasks done. Ford was famous. He didn't drink, he didn't smoke, he didn't dance. So he was a pretty dull guy, but he did business with Walter Flanders who did. Invent the assembly line [00:30:00] and Flanders was a hard drinking womanizer bar fighter.
And then he went into partnership with the Dodge brothers who were even worse. Both of the Dodge brothers, I said, died of flu. They actually died of cirrhosis. They were drunk all the time, but they were brilliant mechanics. So Ford knew. How to take people in, use them, get what he needed, and then Flanders, he would get rid of it.
There was a big suit about, with the Dodge brothers, because Ford just tried to buy everybody out of the Ford company. So Ford went from one venture to another. Until he had what he wanted. And even the Model T, which I get 1908, even the Model T, which everybody remembers was not the best or cheapest car at the time.
The Buick 10 was much better. And that was Billy Durant who started General Motors. You have all of these inter. interlacing stories and Ford is also a [00:31:00] huge element of luck in the patent suit against Seldon. Well, Seldon sued him because there's a pioneer patent thing, which we can talk about in a minute, but Seldon Maybe you should just
Andrea Hiott: say it really quick about Seldon.
He had already gotten a patent for basically the automobile. He got
Lawrence Goldstone: a patent for something that didn't really work. Exactly. But in 1896, The Supreme Court in Westinghouse versus Boyden Power Break ruled that if you invent something and get a patent, then not only are you, is your own idea patented, but all the improvements that someone will make coming out would infringe your patent.
It's called a pioneer patent. And that's the grounds that the Wright brothers sued Blaine Curtis. And so when Seldin got his patent. He, he got investors and they started a consortium and that consortium controlled all automobile patents based on this [00:32:00] 1896 case. By the way, the opinion was written by Henry Billings Brown, who that same year wrote the opinion in Plessy versus Ferguson, which was the separate but equal case that allowed segregation.
Henry Billings Brown was not the most enlightened justice. So you have this situation where people could lock up an industry. Basically monopolize an industry. By the way, minor patents still exist. It's much harder to get one. Yeah, it's not, but there's no jurisprudence that is, that has over, overruled it.
So... Ford, when this automobile consortium sued everybody who didn't join them, Ford was one of the only people who wouldn't give in. He just wouldn't give in. He was going on, he was going on, he was going on, then it looked like he was going to lose, and he was willing to sell out to Billy Durant, who had started General Motors, but the deal just didn't happen soon enough, [00:33:00] and then Ford won his case.
So by the way, an incorrect ruling, Ford should not have won the case because the pioneer patent statute, the guy who wrote the judge who wrote the decision really had it wrong. So Ford was immensely lucky. A, he didn't sell out. He didn't sell out in time. Then he wins the case and he shouldn't have won the case.
And then he goes on to be the richest man in America. It's
Andrea Hiott: hard to go back to this theme of justice, sometimes it's hard to look back at these moments in history or the way that it eventually gets interpreted, that certain people are just sort of known as being the hero or the pioneer when so many others actually gave so much more towards that innovation.
Do you ever wrestle with that when you're writing these books? Because all of your books look at a pivotal moment that's usually got quite a bit of unjust situations involved with it. I grew up in
Lawrence Goldstone: Brooklyn rooting for the Dodgers, so I'm used to rooting for the underdog and having them lose. You know, justice is kind of an asymptote.
It's something you can get close to, but you're [00:34:00] never gonna, you're never gonna get to. Um, yeah, I mean, it bothers me. That's why I write about it. And you do your best. And I divide the world between people who move the process forward and people who hold it back. And I just want to be one of the people who move it forward.
Do you
Andrea Hiott: think the truth always comes out eventually? Do you think the truth always comes out eventually? Oh, God no. No, you don't think so, over time, you don't
Lawrence Goldstone: know, oh no, we still lionize some of the work my wife writes about European history and she's also a great writer and she writes about women, mostly royalty, who had enormous impact political and economic impact on the societies they lived in.
Yolanda Aragon who basically found Joan of Arc, who put out a We put out an ad, Mystic wanted because her, because the king wouldn't fight, you know, and she was lost to history until Nancy did it. So, but
Andrea Hiott: that's 600 years. That's kind of what I mean, Nancy did it [00:35:00] and you're, you're doing this, so. Well, you know, but how about, how many people who don't
Lawrence Goldstone: give up.
Yeah, but how, well, look, you do what you can, but how many stories are told? I mean, how many people really know? That Steve Jobs didn't invent anything. If you ask a thousand people on the street. What did Steve Jobs invent? They would say, Oh, Apple, the iPod is something. And he didn't, you know, other people did now that doesn't take away from his marshaling this technology through, but we have lots of, we have a lot of bad people in history who are still.
And, and my view is you, you look at it, you know, you look at things a little bit differently. Um, the Supreme Court, you know, we're back again, that the truth usually comes out in a way, when it does, is that the people who wielded power, are exposed to be something else. And [00:36:00] that's where those are the truths that are exposed.
Do I think all of them get exposed? No, not nearly. But do I think that people who spend their time trying to expose those truths? I think that's great. Mm hmm. Me
Andrea Hiott: too. And I know it's a little idealistic to say, but I really do think the truth does come out. It's just that not everyone might hear it or recognize it.
Definitely not in fair time. That's for sure. But I think that's part of what history is. Historians, people writing like you and your wife, you know, Um, looking and observing and critically analyzing these stories that we all take for granted. Even some of us when we're in positions of power and spreading those stories, we just take them for granted because we've always heard them.
Like the Wrights Brothers or, you know, just because Henry Ford is associated with cars, we just assume somehow that, yeah, he invented the car, which he didn't at all. Not even near, um, or, or the, or the, uh, assembly line and all that. So it's a lot of it's assumption, right? They're just things [00:37:00] that you don't even know that you're assuming you're just think.
Everyone's always said that, it must be
Lawrence Goldstone: right. I, I have a thing called the any fool can see argument. Whenever you have something where someone says, well as any fool can see, I am instantly suspicious.
Andrea Hiott: It's almost counter counterintuitive. Yes, well,
Lawrence Goldstone: everything
Andrea Hiott: I mean for everyday life, you know, yeah, no, but it works exactly what people don't do is what I'm saying.
Yes,
Lawrence Goldstone: yes. Well, there's not a lot of skepticism is not a lot of look people. Um, there is a wonderful book. called The Drunkard's Walk by Leonard Ladnau, who used to work with, he's a physicist, used to work with Stephen Hawking. And it's about randomness. And people hate randomness. And our lives, of course, are random.
We always want to put, like, meaning on something. Like, when I get COVID for the second time, Nancy, Nancy goes, You've got it at the gym. Maybe I got it at the gym. I am at the gym a lot. Maybe I got it someplace else. No, you [00:38:00] got it at the gym. We need, we want to be able to put things in a place. Actually, it's much better off when you don't, when you deal with, when you deal with unknowns as.
You start with an unknown and then say, how can I make more sense out of this? You might not be able to make total sense out of it, but the looking for an answer to a question is a very dangerous practice.
Andrea Hiott: Because there's always more than one answer and always more than one perspective on the question itself.
Lawrence Goldstone: You know, it's, it's nuance. You can't be an effective thinker. without a good healthy sense of nuance.
Andrea Hiott: But I do understand this desire to want to understand things. It goes back a bit to you mentioned history as narrative and there is, you know, even in the writing process, you do have to make decisions and fit things into a narrative.
And I think in our own lives, we also try to do that just as a means of being able [00:39:00] to continue through the day sometimes, or perhaps your wife just wanting to kind of. Get things a little under control. Maybe she's worried that you're sick or she doesn't want the family to get sick. So it just, I can understand this does help in a way, doesn't it?
No, she
Lawrence Goldstone: wants to be bad at me because she doesn't go to the gym.
Andrea Hiott: Okay. Yeah. And that too. Yeah, that too.
Lawrence Goldstone: It's all, it all, it all worked out. We both tested negative this morning. It's all good. Okay,
Andrea Hiott: good. So everyone's okay. So I want to go back just a little bit to, we were talking about Beachy and he's this amazing person who, as you were saying, did some really innovative.
Flying maneuvers and so on that no one seems to ever have ever heard of. I've also, you mentioned Harriet Quimby, I think, and these people, like, maybe you can just tell us a little bit about that part of flying, which isn't the kind of patent and trying to sell the airplane side, what were these people doing and what was that spirit like?
How did that start?
Lawrence Goldstone: Harriet Quimby was great. She [00:40:00] was drop dead gorgeous. One of the, considered one of the most beautiful women in the world. And if you see pictures, it's true. She was an actress. She was a screenwriter working with D. W. Griffith, who's, and because her best friend was Griffith's, uh, I think married him ultimately.
She was a race car driver and then she took to flying. And she would design her own one piece flying suit. She was the first woman to fly across the English Channel. And she was mobbed, mobbed in Parkour, I think was the name of the town that she landed in. And then in 1912, gee, I think it was 1912, she was flying in an air show in Boston.
And unbelievably back then, remember, these planes had no fuselage, they were open. Basically just open frames with wings. They hadn't, they hadn't been using seatbelts yet. They had just started, but most people didn't [00:41:00] use seatbelts. And Quimby's plane was over Boston Harbor, lost control, which happened, the engine died, went straight down, and she was thrown out of the plane.
Because she wasn't wearing a seatbelt. And the plane landed, ended up landing intact. And if she had not been thrown out of the plane, she would have lived, but she died in Boston Harbor.
Andrea Hiott: It's one of those innovations you just think someone would have thought of. Well,
Lawrence Goldstone: in the first, they did, ultimately, you know.
That's the other thing. What seems obvious now wasn't then. In the first five years of flying, I think it was the first five years, from 1908 A flyer was killed on the average of one every 10 days. Incredible. Wow. Yeah. But they were drawn to it. It's that pioneer spirit. You see it now with X Games and people doing stuff, just watch the skiers basically [00:42:00] skiing down vertical faces.
And I look and I, you know, I consider myself a reasonably adventurous person. So I look and I would say, never not. Ever in a million years, it's a particular kind of person who wants to just experience something that no one else has experienced before.
Andrea Hiott: I think there's a lot of people like that in the motoring world, whether it's cars and racing or it's the planes like we're talking about or, and I wonder what you think, you know, having written about the history of this, what role that plays in the innovation itself and in the kind of overall trajectory of how these things go, are they important parts of it?
Lawrence Goldstone: I think it's, it's huge. It is huge. The sense of wanting to be in the air, wanting to be under the water, going fast, speed is just intoxicating. I used to do a little car racing when I was younger. Oh, really? Oh yeah. Stock out in Long Island. [00:43:00]
Andrea Hiott: So you know this firsthand.
Lawrence Goldstone: Well, I do have my own car. Little 280z.
And I love it. And even now, I get in the car and everybody goes, you know, be careful, be careful, be careful. But I'm the one everybody wants to drive with. No, because I love it. But there's a sensation of speed. It is visceral. And there is a sensation of flight. Which is visceral. There is a sensation of being under the water, which is visceral.
And that brings these people, you know, this isn't most of them. Yeah. They want to make money and monetize everything, but they are drawn to these human needs. That most people have to some degree and the adrenaline junkie and the whole thing about combat. There is something about living with adrenaline that once you're not doing it, you're really missing.[00:44:00]
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, we know what matters in those moments, I guess, and you, and you also feel like you do want to live. There is this, you do want to continue. You know it in those moments.
Lawrence Goldstone: Well, you're the neuroscientist. So, I mean, I'm sure that you would look at, I have a friend who, another friend who's also a neuroscientist, and he said, you know, you take pictures of the brain and you can see it.
You can see what is going on with these people. Alex Honnold, the guy who free soloed up El Capitan, they did a brain scan on him and they said. He doesn't feel fear. He just doesn't feel it's abnormal. And in many walks of life, it would, it would limit him. But for that, it's perfect because most of the stuff.
Most accidents happen when fear intrudes on just doing. You slow down, you clutch, you lose balance, you lose focus just for that second. So the people who can either conquer fear or don't [00:45:00] have any are at this enormous advantage. And they, they're the ones who do all this stuff. And then the rest of us kind of follow along when it gets safer.
Andrea Hiott: I think that's, that's true. I would say it's not just the brain. It's also the whole body is reacting in a certain way too. And, um, and it can go both ways, you know, it can also just be a pure kind of where you're very much present and everything is, you know, almost like when you have an accident or something and everything moves slowly and you remember and you're really in the moment in a very different way.
And that can be addictive and it can also be, um, very helpful for whatever you're trying to, to accomplish. So it's, it's fascinating how the body changes.
Lawrence Goldstone: The great athletes will tell you the game slows down. Mm-hmm. . Yeah. And that's happened.
Andrea Hiott: The slow
Lawrence Goldstone: state playing sports. When you look, when you can make decisions that much faster because it seems to be going slower.
Absolutely. Once or twice to me in my life playing sports. But it happens to the great ones regularly. The game [00:46:00] just moves slower for them. You make decisions and the other thing is, I guess they get to trust it. So you know, it's like, it's like the cartoon character who walks off the edge of the cliff but doesn't fall until I look down, these guys don't look down.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. There's definitely something to that. The way you were describing fear, it's, uh, it's not the fear, it's that you're aware of the situation you're in, in a particular way, kind of like the guy who's, who suddenly realizes there's nothing underneath him. But you can also, um, practice. You know, discipline yourself towards changing what that state is.
So, and I think, um, I just, I wonder if you see any connection between that and someone like Ford or Jobs or these people who also advance innovation and advance, um, what we come to think of as our, as progress, but are they also sort of courting an edge, uh, from some point of do you, do you, do you think?[00:47:00]
Lawrence Goldstone: I don't know, but my instinct would be no now Henry Ford before was drove race cars, including this one called the 999, which went so fast, no one else would get in it with them. So on that level, yes, as a physical phenomenon. But do I see this kind of. Being removed in a business sense.
Andrea Hiott: And there's definitely this drive, right?
This drive to succeed. And you, you get it in athletes, you get it in race car drivers, you get it in people like jobs, but it's, there seems to be something different about it, right? It's not, um, it's not as in the moment and present or, or is it? I don't know. I really don't have an
Lawrence Goldstone: answer. I worked on wall street and, and.
You know, at a pretty high power trading company and these people, they were, they were risk averse in a funny kind of way. It was more, more, uh, methodical. What they wanted was to create an atmosphere where they could [00:48:00] be successful and make a ton of money, like a jobs, which I think goes against. It's the opposite of this drive, which allows you to act instinctively.
I mean, that's the thing in the, in these, in these physical, in this physical aspect of it. Where under threat, you need to act really fast, really instinctively. I don't think that happens in business too much, but somebody breaks into the house that clicks in. So I think that I think that what we're talking about, at least as far as I can determine is a physical phenomenon, not a kind of thought based business oriented.
Andrea Hiott: I guess I would say that I agree with that on a normal business. But when you look at someone like Jobs, who is constantly taking risks or even Ford, maybe even in the way they were trying to corral other people, sort of, there seems to be some [00:49:00] physical aspect to it that could also be addictive, uh, in terms of power, maybe it's just,
Lawrence Goldstone: Oh yeah.
If you're talking about that, I agree. I mean, certainly. Our is addictive. There is no question. But yeah, I mean, if you want to say that the adrenaline rush on a foreign exchange currency trader is the same adrenaline rush as the guy who climbs El Cap, I'd agree with that. But the adrenaline rush is, one is demanding an instinctive response.
One is, one is demanding like you move out of your head. The other one, you're in your head. That's a good way to put it. Business decisions, the bond trader, the foreign exchange trader, you know, he may make a trade instinctively, but he's always in his head. You know, and in fact, when you're out of your head and you start doing things on instinct, that's when you lose money.
So, so for, on a, on a business sense, I think those same kinds of reactions that work for athletes work to the [00:50:00] detriment of being successful in business.
Andrea Hiott: That's a good way to put it because a lot of drivers, race car drivers or extreme athletes are just very good athletes do describe it as becoming at one sort of with whatever.
You're moving and is moving you. And that's a very different sort of thing than manipulation on thought. Thought based. Yeah. You stop
Lawrence Goldstone: thinking. Yeah. You stop thinking when you, when when you're, you're present, but you're not
Andrea Hiott: thinking.
Lawrence Goldstone: Right? Yeah. You know the, when you start to think, that's when you get in trouble.
If you're driving, if you're driving around a race course, and I didn't call, mine was minor, but if you're doing Formula one DRA racing and you're coming into a a hairpin turn and it demands shifting and. And downshifting and then hitting the term just right. If you think about it. You know, it's over.
You're going to be going to be off the road. So what you have to do is to trust that the process is embedded enough in you that you simply do it that you downshift when you're supposed to downshift. You [00:51:00] trust the process when you're in business. And, you know, you realize the market just turned against you.
You have to process that information differently and react differently than the race car driver who's coming into the turn.
Andrea Hiott: That's absolutely. Yeah. That makes, that's a good way to put it. I wonder if we could even zoom out even a little bit more and think about how all these parts fit together in something like the patent cases we were talking about with ownership and so on.
Like how. Do we need this, this, uh, detail oriented, thought based kind of innovator or, or businessmen. And also, you know, all you've written about the Supreme Court and this deliberation. Um, does this get in the way of innovation? Does this help innovation? Does this keep people in check? Like, how do you see, how do you see these things having written about it from so many different angles?
Lawrence Goldstone: There's a balance. You're, you know, can we. Weird [00:52:00] innovation, pure innovation be more open without any of the other. Well, yeah, but then what do you do with it? Um, we need both. The problem with almost everything in society is that it requires a balance and finding the right balance. It's very difficult in law.
For example, one of my themes is in constitutional law is law, language or ideals. If it's just now you go to the conservatives, you go to somebody like Antonin Scalia. Law is language. He wants a dead constitution. But you go to somebody like, say, a Stephen Breyer, and he will say law is an ideal that you want it.
You can't be simply, you can't simply be wedded to the language regardless of what it says, because it's a reductio ad absurdum. That's the logical argument where everything, all the steps are correct, but you come to an absurd [00:53:00] conclusion. So it's a logical fallacy and you can't eliminate language from law either because then you have no law.
So you look at the constitution in my. Premises of the constitution was written to be vague, which I'm writing another book on now because they wanted, they knew a, you couldn't get it ratified by the states and the country was going to change and all that the language of the constitution matters. But when the language of the constitution brings you to a point and equal rights, that seems to go against what they wrote it for 14th amendment and 15th amendment.
In particular, then language is being misused. Then the balance has shifted. Um, the 15th amendment says no one should be deprived the right to vote because of race. ethnicity or previous condition of servitude. Seems pretty clear. Free slaves have the right to vote. Yet in 1884, 1882, Justice Bradley, Justice Bradley said, [00:54:00] no, the 15th amendment doesn't guarantee the right to vote.
All it says is that you can't be deprived of the right to vote based on race. Now that seems simple, but it isn't because it shifts the burden of proof. From the state to prove that it had not discriminated through the individual to prove that the state had discriminated. And that, of course, turned out to be impossible.
And then we end up with Jim Crow. So their language. Which was parsed probably correctly. Grammatically leads you to a place that you don't want to be. So, so in this, the, the analogy between this and the innovation process, I think is sound. We need a balance between what we would consider. either extremes or poles or different ways of thinking, however you want to put it, and finding the right balance.
That's the challenge. And sometimes the right balance will change and we will become too language heavy or we will become too ideals
Andrea Hiott: heavy. You, you talked about [00:55:00] balance. I want to think about this too, because balance for who, right? In this discussion that we've been having, that the balance of who's being included depends also on the perspective and quite often it takes this risk, this edge work, be it social or, or if we're talking about in terms of innovation to actually push what people are aware of.
Uh, the narratives as we were discussing earlier, just to even bring a chance of giving credit where credit really is due or shining a light on something that's been going on forever, but that the people in power don't know about or have chosen to ignore. So I wonder if you can also think about how this idea of the daredevil or the risk taker, the person who literally gives their life to, to a cause also expands into the social and political realm too.
Lawrence Goldstone: Well, that brings us back to your question about does the truth always come out? Do we always end up at justice? And I said the answer is no, and [00:56:00] clearly the answer is no. It is something we work toward. It is a goal that you and I and other people like us work toward. In terms of the daredevils, Yeah, now, it would give a false impression to say these people did this, they made this great contribution to society, and now they're forgotten.
Yeah, but that's not why they did it. They have all sorts of documentaries now about these climbers who, most of them die. Now, we didn't make documentaries back in 1915, and so, yeah, the daredevils do it for a whole different set of reasons. Very few of these daredevils go, I think I'm going to climb Mount Everest with no oxygen because boy, there's a lot of money in it.
I think they go, I'm going to climb Mount Everest with no oxygen because I want to do it. And no one's ever done this before. So I think that the daredevils [00:57:00] absolutely expand the boundaries of Potential action by other daredevils and society as a whole. And yes, I think many of them are totally forgotten.
And the question, is it fair? And the answer is, well, no, on one sense, it isn't fair. And on the other sense, it is fair because. They didn't care. Most of the people didn't care. Alex Heidel didn't want to be filmed for a really long day. He had to be talked into it because he said, you know, He's just doing it because that's what he did.
He said, we had to be really careful because you distract the guy who's on a 3, 000 foot wall, you know, and he falls. Then you say, I'm responsible for that. And so, ultimately did it. Alex Honnold became a big celebrity, and they win the Oscar and do all of that. But that's not why he did it. And so, all of these experimenters, which is again, why I think [00:58:00] you have to separate the physical, this physical instinct to do this sort of thing, and the non physical between, again, the bond trader and the climber.
You know, one of them is doing it because, oh man, I don't want to lose money. And the other one is doing it is, oh man, I don't want to fall. So, yeah, I think we ignore, I think that many of the daredevils get lost. You
Andrea Hiott: know, you write about civil rights and you write about these kind of really terrible times in American history and often.
People put their lives on the line to change those by showing they have to go to an extreme in their own life that they might not choose to go to. It is an edge just so other people recognize that they're having to live a certain life or that just to try to push this kind of balance, this middle thing that other people think is balanced to show that's not balanced at all.
No, that's
Lawrence Goldstone: totally right. That's [00:59:00] totally right. But again, the motivation is different. Motivation. Thurgood Marshall defended four young black men who were accused of rape in Florida, and his car was, was ambushed. And now, if Thurgood Marshall had died, if he had been killed there, nobody would have ever heard of Thurgood Marshall.
But now Thurgood Marshall is a revered figure and one of the great black leaders of the 20th century because he didn't die in that ambush. So, yeah, circumstance plays a huge role in this. And if you get caught up, and again, then it brings you back to motivation. If you do things because you're motivated.
I'm a writer. You want to write because you want to be famous and have everybody know who you are and walk in and get a good table. [01:00:00] You are out of your mind. This is a brutal business. 99 percent of the really good writers, most of them don't even get anything published. This is a very tough business. You write because you need to write.
Because it's something you need to say, need to do. If good stuff happens after that, like this podcast. You get to have some fun, that's great, but if that's your reason for going into it, you are doomed.
Andrea Hiott: Right, yeah, that's the motivation, the energy behind it. And also, you are changing the landscape to come back to this kind of...
You are publishing these narratives that at least, um, reintroduce these names in a different way and over time, I do think that adds up and it matters a lot. So, but you got to do it for the right motivation and that kind of touches on a lot of the other things we were talking about where the motivation is coming from and how that manifests itself.
[01:01:00] It also reminds me of something I've heard you say about you're interested in these. pivotal moments in history, regardless if it's in, if it's technology or science or politics. We've talked a lot about how innovation and even social change and progress, it's always social. And yet, as you've shown in your work, it often is one individual's choice.
Maybe even A judge who is himself or herself, uh, kind of the culmination of all that history that they've absorbed that then makes a kind of pivotal decision that many people have to, to deal with for a long time. Have you thought much about that? How? Oh,
Lawrence Goldstone: yeah. I mean, just think of it as walking in the woods.
Every time you come to a fork, every time you come to a choice between two trails, you know, Robert Frost, you make that choice. And that choice will lead you to other. That's what history is. You are constantly [01:02:00] choosing a direction and then another direction and another direction and another direction.
There is no right answer. You don't sit down and say. I'm going to write this book and this is going to solve the problem or everyone is going to read this and see the error of their ways and tell me, wow, Larry, what a smart guy doesn't work like that. What you want to do is to add to the conversation.
What you want to do is give another point of view where you can say, well, that may be true, but what about this aspect of it? I had a political science teacher. Who, I think I mentioned the guy who kind of motivated me. Your supervisor. His name is Saul Resnick. Yeah, he worked at Queens College. And I was a really cocky student.
And he was a really tough teacher. And I would just raise my hand and talk all the time. And he did something once and I said, Hey Saul, but what about [01:03:00] that? And he looked at me and he said, Pardon my French. He said, Schmuck, you have the facts, but you don't have the understanding. And man, was he right. And I realized that facts, that goes back to language and ideals in law.
The facts are the refuge of people language, are the refuge of people who want to move in a particular direction or don't want to move at all. And understanding that is, you know, Einstein had understanding. These people get it. These people saw the fundamental, we're back to the simplicity. So you're aspiring.
To go past the facts, you're aspiring to get a sense of on the in the abstract of what's going on underneath and then building on top of that and adding to the sum, adding to the sum of human knowledge is a nice way to put it. But what you're trying to do is add to the variables that [01:04:00] people have to consider.
When they're dealing with a certain phenomenon,
Andrea Hiott: I like that you started with this idea of taking a path you brought up for us about, but if you really think of it in that way as path, you're either taking a path that's been less traveled. And so therefore making it a little more travelable, or you're maybe even creating a new path in some cases.
And other people can find that path and follow it and or you
Lawrence Goldstone: hit a dead end and you're and you turn out to be totally wrong everything you've done is useless and that happens to people and we need a certain number of people who end up in the dead ends because these problems don't get solved because someone you know has oh i have a brain with It's a lot of people, a lot of the people who are competing with Gutenberg.
They, who were they? Well, we'll never know. How far did they get? We'll never know that either. How many people who were trying to invent an airplane? Now we know some of them, but I guarantee you we don't know all of them. And I guarantee you we don't know all the people who are trying to do [01:05:00] motoring.
Because the dead ends, what you are trusting is that the process is such that someone is going to find the right answer. But it's never going to be because only one person's
Andrea Hiott: looking. No. And I would even push back a little on the dead end thing. I, I don't think there's necessarily a dead end so much as you just realize you've gone completely the wrong direction.
So maybe even that path is going to lead to something else, but it's not going to lead to what you thought. And also it. All the people who, who are trying to get to that place know definitely don't go that direction. So it's very informative still, even if it's not going to take you where you wanted to go initially.
And that's,
Lawrence Goldstone: that's a nice optimistic view, but the person, but the person who spends 20 years trying to do something, developing the new drug or working on the Alzheimer's drug, and it totally dead ends. And it turns out that they made the wrong turn when they started, and it was hopeless. Most of those people, you know, [01:06:00] yeah, they might take some solace in, well, nobody else is going to try this, but I don't know,
Andrea Hiott: I, you know.
It's definitely tragic if, especially if you've started a premise that was wrong, like when you, when you think about Alzheimer's research and there are certain premises that are, might be wrong and you've spent a lot of money in your life doing that. But along the way, also, you've probably opened up some new paths and connections to things that.
might not be about Alzheimer research, but that, and I've seen this happen in science, someone else will find the methods that you were using or something in your paper that will then help a completely different subject, maybe.
Lawrence Goldstone: That's right. That's definitely right. Yeah. I don't think it's worthless.
Nothing is worthless, but we're, you know, we're talking about the incentive to do it and real genuine dead ends are rare, but the, for the people doing it. You know, it's still going to be the person. It's still going to be the Bill Gates of the Steve Jobs of the Henry Ford's who [01:07:00] Find their way through the thicket and come out on the other side who are going to get all the credit while the other people Will tend to be forgotten or be footnotes or just things like Akhtar Shenoud in aviation You know people who really know the subject know who Akhtar Shenoud is but nobody who's just kind of vaguely Familiar with early flight is going to know who he is
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, that's true.
There's definitely this larger trajectory that takes over and a lot of the smaller ones just get either smushed into it or forgotten. And one can't say that's unfair or fair, but it can definitely be tragic. Yeah. It's, yeah, it's sort of beyond that in a way, I did want to ask you about just writing and research as a form of transportation, which might sound a little weird, but you and your wife, Nancy, early on, I think you wrote a lot of books about books, right?
And manuscripts. You have a [01:08:00] real love of books, I think, and stories and narratives. And I just, I think of these also as technologies and forms of transportation. I wonder if that makes any sense to you.
Lawrence Goldstone: Well, Nancy definitely, writing is definitely transporting because she, she lives in the period. When she, uh, I got really sick a couple of years ago and I was fine and she was writing about Maria Teresa and she said to me, you better thank Maria Teresa because she's the one who pulled you through this.
Oh
Andrea Hiott: yeah. So she really like, it's almost like a character actor who becomes a character. Yeah.
Lawrence Goldstone: She believes it. But it is transporting. I just, you, you drop into. The period you're writing about, you can't help it. And it's, it's really fun. It's not a physical time machine, but it's a kind of spiritual time machine.
And you get a sense and it opens up, it opens up the way other people feel and thought. And you get the similarities and you get the differences. [01:09:00] And yeah, it is very cool doing what we do. It's just
Andrea Hiott: really fun. And you also transport other people. You also transport your readers.
Lawrence Goldstone: If it
Andrea Hiott: works, yes. These books are also kind of paths that lead people into new places or thoughts or also can contribute to new ideas or even new innovations.
Lawrence Goldstone: That's, that's, that's the idea. I guess
Andrea Hiott: that's what all, all writers are
Lawrence Goldstone: doing. Well, not all, but a lot of the good ones.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah. Well, um, thanks for talking today. I did kind of want to get your thoughts like about if you have any on this turn recently towards electric transportation. I wonder if you thought much about it, if it enters into your life at all, if there are any similarities to the Curtis or the Ford.
Lawrence Goldstone: All I will tell you is that the very first fleet taxis in New York City in 1899 or all electric, and it was brilliant. [01:10:00] It was brilliantly done and they had a charging station except they didn't charge the batteries. They had 12 taxis with a 13th for repairs. Taxi would run its 40 miles, come in, they would lift the battery out, put a new battery in, charge the battery off site, and Electric vehicles were on the verge of being the dominant technology when, uh, in 1903, a bunch of speculators bought the taxi company and turned it into a big Ponzi scheme and eventually went broke and Gasoline technology took over, and the problem now is problem with electric cars.
It's it's you can't go distance for one thing, and it takes too long to charge up your car, and the chargers are not compatible. So [01:11:00] we are in the very early stages. When battery technology improves to where you can go, you know, 500 miles the same or 450, and you can charge up. Your car in five minutes rather than 45 and the battery doesn't keep losing power.
Then we will be at a whole different place. So, yeah, I think we're moving toward internal internal combustion engine is really, it's look, it's inefficient and it's polluting and it's time that we move on to something else, but we were at electronic technology at a very sophisticated place in 1899. When it was ruined by speculators.
So yeah, I'm interested.
Andrea Hiott: I just want to say thanks for putting those stories out. I know I'm sure you'll keep doing it. Oh yeah.
Lawrence Goldstone: It's really great fun. This was great. I mean, cause this was what I was hoping [01:12:00] for. Much more broad and much more philosophical discussion. Yeah,
Andrea Hiott: it was
Lawrence Goldstone: really interesting. It was really fun. I'm glad I did it.
Thank you. And, uh, good luck with what you're
Andrea Hiott: doing. Thanks. Good luck to you too. And take care. Thanks so much. Bye.