Walter Isaacson talks about Steve Jobs

[Applause] well it's a pleasure to talk to you about Steve Jobs I'm going to just do it informally and perhaps we can have a discussion uh but I'll give some of the background of the book and some of the lessons I learned the background actually came because of the Aspen Institute a bit in 200 uh late 2003 right when I got this job or early 2004 I got a call from Steve Jobs who I I'd Known him intermittently over the years ever since 1984 when he had come to time magazine to show off the original

MacIntosh and even back then he was a bit of a handful and you could see two sides of his personality uh this is 1984 and he is showing us the absolute beauty of the Mac that he had designed every curve everything on the face of the Mac I'm going to borrow this for a second I mean this is what he looked like back then and this was the original MacIntosh And he would just show how he had cut that down so it looked like a human face and a smile and he had a loop so

we could look at all of the icons of it but then you saw the other Steve Jobs because he was absolutely Furious that we had not made a man of the year in 1983 and that there had been a story in Time magazine that was not uh that sort of showed his rough side as well as his upside and so I remember him just saying We were a terrible magazine not nearly as good as Newsweek and that's why we didn't understand the importance of this machine uh I came out of that meeting despite this sort

of or maybe because of this intensity and passion in both directions really liking Steve Jobs and over the years uh we sort of vaguely kept in touch in fact every now and then uh he'd become my best friend again for one day every six months or so when either apple or next computer or Pixar Had a new product out and he'd say well you know I I you're the only person who might understand this and we'd go have a sushi at uh a restaurant downtown and he tried to convince us to put it on the

cover so when I got the call in 2004 I had just uh I had finished uh I had published a book on Benjamin Franklin was finishing one on Einstein and Steve says to me why don't you do me next and uh my first reaction is you know Franklin Einstein Steve you Know what a uh AR well anyway um so politely I said um well yeah maybe someday in 30 20 30 years when you retire you know I could see doing it eventually though I got a call from his wife and I was talking to her

and she said if you're going to do Steve you ought to do it now you got to do it now and I realized okay um I didn't you know he was sick and not only had he transformed six Industries but he was doing it while battling cancer and it Was just an amazing tale of being at the intersection of all Art and Science of the intersection of the humanities and uh entrepreneurship and technology and that's what the Institute was all about and it seemed like a great thing and I even said to her I said

well gee you know I didn't know when Steve called me that he was sick she said nobody knew he kept it an absolute secret the day he called you was the day he was operated the before he was day before he was Operated on for cancer so I decided that you know yes I would definitely want to do this book um the thing that struck me is his intensity and it really goes back to his childhood Roots he was adopted he was uh the the birth son of a Syrian from H Syria very big family

in HS the now the center of the Revolution there uh named Abdu jandali and every now and then you'll see in the papers if you're reading about what's happening in Syria John family mentioned uh but uh he was put up for adoption was adopted by a truly wonderful guy Paul jobs who was a high school dropout Coast Guard guy who had become an auto mechanic and a Repo Man a guy who repossessed cars for a finance company in uh the valley of California and uh Steve was always knew he was adopted and he said you

know as we were walking through his old neighbor he's pointing out he said yes it had an impact on me and he pointed um right Across the street from the house where he grew up in as a little child he said yeah when I was four I knew i' been adopted and I walked across the street and I told the girl who lived across the street that I was adopted and she said oh that means your parents didn't want you that you were abandoned and he said I ran across the street and talked to my

parents and they said listen carefully we specifically picked you out you were chosen you are special and he said so I Always grew up feeling a misfit a rebel if you remember the great ads of Apple you know here's the Misfits the Rebels the people who think differently different uh but I also felt uh well in the book I explain why he thinks the grammar is right uh it's a noun think different um uh but he uh you know he said I always felt Chosen and special I felt I was you know the normal rules

didn't apply to me and for good and for bad that was the reality Distortion Field around Steve Jobs was that the normal rules did not apply to him his father also cared very much about design his father uh being an auto mechanic would fix up cars and resell them and he used to have pictures of the beautiful end to-end design of a car from the chassis to the trims and the molding and he uh was building a fence with Steve one day when Steve was about nine or 10 years old and Paul job said we

have to make the back of the fence just as Beautiful and as well done as the front and Steve says well why nobody will ever see it nobody will ever know and and his father said yes but you will know and so all of that became part of this passion for Perfection but also the design sensibility of Steve Jobs he was part of that period of which Steve Weissman knows well although he was in Southern California Bev's H HS high but in the Bay area of California in the late 1960s you had the Confluence of

the Counterculture the Free Speech movement the rebel movement but also the burgeoning technology movement the microprocessor having just been uh invented by Intel and somehow for a while the computer types uh were at odds with the Counter Culture types who were Back To Nature but also believed that computers were tools of the Pentagon and the power structure but there becomes a computers to the people movement of which uh the whole earth catalog and Even Steve Jobs is part of because they formed the Homebrew Computer Club and that becomes the ethos in which Steve grew up

he has both sides of that culture in him sort of the alternative counterculture streak as well as the engineering entrepreneurial streak uh goes off to college and drops out of Reed College drops out after a semester but sort of sticks around campus for a while taking the calligraphy courses and the courses on the beauty also goes to India to uh see the maharaji who actually dies before Steve gets there but Steve still Spends months wandering in India pennil on the journey uh becoming very involved in his Buddhist training believing that the journey is the reward

as uh was his Mantra and uh ends up coming back and all those who had been part of the Buddhist the Zen Buddhist training and had gone to India that whole crowd started uh work on an Apple commune in Uh Southern Oregon and indeed that's where the name Apple sprang up because Steve is doing that but also keeping his toe in the more electronic geeky technology side of the equation working at Atari he had come into Atari after the trip of India Barefoot wearing his Indian robes he had become a total vegan uh read uh

uh uh the mucusless diet and diet for a small planet actually believe that if you had a total fruit only a fruitarian and vegetable diet that you Would not have body odor so you didn't have to bathe the used deodorant uh this was a theory that was incorrect but um you can laugh so uh they put him on the night shift at Atari because they have trouble working with him Nolan Bushnell and Al alorn the great founders of Atari there but Steve learns a lot at Atari first of all the simpli how to juice a

microchip to do spectacular things secondly the need for Simplicity I mean if those of you who remember pong and other things realize that it had to be simple enough for a stoned freshman to figure it out so they usually had you know for space wars you know the the only instructions were insert quarter avoid Klingons you know it just that simple and he has this friend that he had met who had gone to Homestead High School a few years ahead of him he was doing things with named Steve wnc and wnc uh loved to come

to Atari at night and uh sort of play the games while Steve worked Steve finally got a commission to take pong which you may remember uh which was you know sort of a blip between two paddles type game and turn it into a single player game which becomes breakout where you just hit it against the wall and it breaks the bricks out uh and uh Steve of course is not as great of an engineer as was and he says to was you got to do it and we have to do it in four days W

says you can't we can't design it take a month month and a half Steve says look at me you can do it and Steve had developed an unblinking stare and he told wak don't be afraid you can do it and wak said that was his reality Distortion field but the weird thing about the reality Distortion field as W pointed out is that W did it he did that entire game became a big game in four days and he said the great thing about the reality Distortion field is it Actually distorts reality it makes you believe

something is that is impossible you can do and then you do it and this you see throughout his career at Apple I'll Leap Forward for a moment because there's a guy I really admire named wend weeks who runs uh corn and glass as a CEO we were talking about he said yeah I remember when Steve Jobs was looking for a glass a form of glass could be on the iPhone he didn't want it to be plastic and and he was looking in you know they Had tried to find glass from China to be strong enough

and finally John cely Brown who works with us at The Institute is on the board of Corning call Steve and says you should go to Corning New York and look at Corning Glass because they can actually maybe try this out so he goes to Corning New York there's window weeks uh Steve Jobs sits in the office here's exactly what I need window weeks said well we once did a certain type of process that made something that Would have created something we call would call Gorilla Glass which would make it really strong and uh um Steve

said no no no that wouldn't work here's and weak said no I had to say wait a minute I know how to make glass shut up and listen and he showed it so he says okay I believe you the iPhone's coming out in October this year I need this much glass and window week said well we've never manufactured we've never done it before it was just a theoretical It's actually done when they thought Ralph NATO was going to make him make strong windshields and then he I guess something happened so so um we said I'm

sorry we can't do it and Steve Jobs said the same thing he had said to W way back 35 years earlier which is don't be afraid you can do it and weeks thought this is the weirdest thing then weeks picked up the phone and called the plant in Lexington Kentucky that was making Blast for uh flat screens and said I Want you to convert to making this new process starting tomorrow and they did it which is why every piece of glass on every iPhone and iPad is made by corn and glass it's that reality Distortion

field but I've jumped ahead of the story just a little bit I mean Steve does that at Atari they create great things was and he creates something called the blue box which um allows them to make phone calls for free by replicating the to and finally they come up with this um this The Apple computer which is W's design but Steve is the one who says we can make money we can Market this we can package it and sell it and so you see this wonderful partnership arise out of which comes the computer that really

does change the world and become the home computer of the first personal computer really revolutionary which is the Apple 2 a totally integrated machine in which Steve has had somebody designed a really beautiful case and what is Still the typical apple style of clean lines put it together with the keyboard and everything else so it wasn't just for hobbyists it was something you could use at home uh the great thing about the Apple 2 is that it adhered to the hacker ethos the Hands-On imperative you should be able to open it up you should have

slots you should be able to put your own motherboards and circuit boards and jacket into the very slots because W was truly of that hacker mentality Steve Jobs was the opposite though he was a control freak he really wanted to control everything from end to end and so he has this big fight with W over the Apple 2 he he wants no ports no slots no way to open w says then I'm going to quit so w wins that argument but as W said I knew it' be the last time I'd win an argument that

is when Steve starts creating the Macintosh the Macintosh being uh the next great computer they do which is totally integrated to end to End with the hardware connected to the software you can't get the Mac operating system without buying the Mac hardware or vice versa there are no screws on the Mac you cannot open it up um no slots everything is tightly controlled like an appliance and as they were shipping as they were getting ready to finish it near time to ship it Steve is looking at everything every icon every curve like I said in

1984 when he came to showus and He looked at the circuit board he said no no this isn't beautiful enough the chips are not lined up exactly right to make it and they say well wait a minute you made it so there no screws you can't open this up even nobody will ever see it nobody will ever know and he says exactly what his father had said to him but you will know so they hold it up for a few months while they redesign the circuit board so it's beautiful even though nobody can open and

see it and Then he makes them all sign their names and they engrave their names he says real artists sh sign their work and engraved on the inside of the Macintosh which nobody can get to it is the 32 Engineers on the Mac team with Stephen P jobs in the middle because that's what he had was this artistic Perfection now the the artistic Perfection goes with the temperament of an artist he's very hard to work with very demanding the reality Distortion Field goes with it as well and he gets ousted from Apple by 1985 the

year after the Mac comes out because he's just both too hard to work with and too demanding and there's a fight with John Skully and the rest of the board he feels abandoned again Scully had been a father figure he brought in everybody on the board was like a father figure to him Arthur Rock uh who used to come visit an aspen back in the old days Mike Marla uh once again he feels abandoned Uh and I'm not going to go through the whole life but as you know he creates next computer does Pixar finally

he gets brought back to Apple because Apple by 1997 is totally fallen off of a cliff can't even make their own operating system anymore and have to buy next computer because it has a Unix operating system with this kernel that can be used seems to be the best system operating system for the new Mac operating system that they need by 1997 but if you buy an Next computer it comes with Steve Jobs and within six months having bought it Steve Jobs is back in the saddle again and running Apple computer he had had a great

falling out with Bill Gates you asked me about his relationship with Bill Bill Gates uh they were like the binary star system of the digital age they had a uh you know a gravitational pull so that their orbits were always interl uh Microsoft and Bill Gates made their name I mean made their first you Know profits really by writing for the Apple 2 and then the Macintosh both word the spreadsheets Excel everything uh but they had two different philosophies Steve's philosophy as I said was end to-end integration Bill's philosophy was license it out if I

create an operating system I'm not going to let IB own it or you know Apple own it it's going to be available to any hardware manufacturer this means that you can't make a perfectly tightly Integrated product because you're licensing your product out to all sorts of people's Hardwares who might use it differently what that makes Steve upset but what also makes him upset is that Steve had uh gotten the graphical user interface uh you know for the original Mac and of course at least in Steve's mind but Bill Gates ripped it off totally rips it

off and uses it for Windows of course uh the original graphical interfaces have been developed At Xerox Park but he's still Furious that uh you know Gates is now using it for Windows so they have the great falling out but what happens when he comes back in 977 one of his first real phone calls Steve makes is to Bill Gates and said I'm come back I'm gonna have to save Apple from all these bozos who've destroyed it you have to invest in Apple you have to help and you have to start writing great software for

Apple again and Gates immediately says yes and he Comes down they have wonderful meetings they arrange all this just and the lawsuits that had been between Apple and Microsoft for 10 years over the intellectual property case over the use of the user graphical interface they drop all of that they shake hands they make this wonderful deal and even at macor somewhat famously in 1997 there's uh Bill Gates up there on the screen announcing the iance with apple again uh the other call just as a Side a bit the other call that um uh Steve made

then was to John warock at Adobe to asking Adobe Systems you know I'm back you've got to start making for the Mac again software and uh Adobe said no you've got a 5% market share it's not worth our while we're not going to do it Steve never forgave him even to the end of his life he was railing about it and if you wonder why when you at your iPhone you cannot use Flash that's why has nothing to do with flash being a Battery hog or anything else there is no way while Steve Jobs was

alive that any Adobe product and Adobe is now into abandon support for Flash because Steve Jobs wanted to destroy Adobe 10 years later simply for having said no when he came back uh the endtoend integration model works not as well as a business model as Bill Gates's open you know license it out as true with the Android as we see now uh with Google but it does make for more tightly integrated Consumer products that work smoothly and instantly you don't get those God awful messages you get whenever you use Microsoft you know Office 2010 with

its you know useless you know sort of way of telling you errors and stuff so uh this allows Apple after it finally has conquered the iMac you know the beautiful design that sort of translucent Beyond blue translucent because he wants you to be able to see the circuit board and how beautiful it Is has a little handle even though it's a desktop computer why because the engineer say that'll cost a lot nobody actually moves desktops around with that little recessed handle he said no people are still afraid of computers but if you put a little

handle it's a sign even though nobody do it which is you can touch me I'm at your service and so it was that sort of understanding of how a consumer would feel when they touch the curve of the iPhone or see the recessed Handle in the iMac but so what he can do then with the end to end integration model is create devices like the iPod being the first one that's totally integrated into the whole Apple system so it's not like those old MP3 players we used to have before the iPod where you couldn't get

it to syn and you were trying to you know attach it to you know your compact your Dell computer or whatever it was and you had to make the playlist on the device it's so seamless You can do the iPod and then of course he decides once it's successful the only way we can lose now that we dominate this Market is the cell phone makers could be smart enough to say we'll let you put music on your cell phone so he cannibalizes the whole iPod business by creating the iPhone and allowing it to replace basically

your iPod uh but it's once again he is then by this point transformed the personal computer industry the uh movie uh animation Digital animation industry then the music industry with the iTunes Store the music sales industry now he does it with the phone industry and finally of course with tablets which as of today you'll read in tomorrow's paper they're now going to totally not only transform publishing and newspapers and magazines but the whole textbook industry because there's no reason you should be lugging around if you're a kid a textbooks in your backpack and they're going

to have Textbook authoring tools so anybody can make textbooks with the iPad and it will transform that industry likewise even retail stores he helps it transform all because of the integrated endend model let me end with this because you know we were talking about Bill Gates and other things it was such an odd LoveHate relationship between the two of them especially since they had these great different philosophies but worked together well and really just a few Months ago a few months before Steve died he was obviously very sick and everybody know and Bill Gates wanted

to come see him uh Steve is not the most gracious of guys I happen to be around I was sort of in the middle of this uh Steve says you know what a jerk actually uses a word that begins with a but I'll leave it a jerk uh you know he uh you know thinks I'm dying he wants to just come make out you know forget but in the end Bill Gates does come down to coopera Just comes down alone knocks on the back door there's Eve the youngest daughter of Steve doing her homework on

the kitchen table as you know Bill Gates says where's your dad she points to the downstairs room where her dad is and they talk for four hours about what it was like you know to be the twin pillars of the digital Revolution and uh in the end um Bill Gates is a truly gracious Humane individual says to Steve something very Nice which is I never thought that the end to-end integrated model would work the way you approached at Apple but you proved it could work at which point Steve Jobs who's not always as gracious says

yeah well you proved your model could work as well well and I thought gee what a wonderful sort of nice rounding out of the wonderful Saga cuz I was uh around and I heard both of them tell the story I think this is a nice you know the sort of violin music plays It well as they're together they each say how much so I and and so when Bill Gates told me this uh I said um he said well you know something else but I didn't tell Steve is that the end integrated model works well

but it only really works well when you got a Steve jobs they are driving it somebody with the artist temperament the artist sensibility the passion for Perfection I thought well that's sweet you know that's really nice so when I see jobs Next I say to him here's what Bill said you know it can only work with somebody like you doing it and I thought you know there's he'd like that and of course I'm wrong Steve looks up and he says what a uh jerk I'll say anybody could have made it worse work uh even Bill

Gates could have made it work the reason he didn't make it work is because he has absolutely no taste so think well there goes the ending of the Book I said but you said his model worked as well that he also was able you know his model was also valid he said yeah the Microsoft Bill Gates model that works very well as long as you don't care about making crappy products that's all Microsoft ever made was crappy products so and the end Steve is Steve you have to write about the person you're writing about people

say well gee he wasn't nice you know wasn't it hard I say well you know if you want nice by Ben Franklin Ben Franklin was nice but also you know Ben Franklin invented the lightning rod and did many other things but Steve Jobs did some pretty amazing things as well and so his way is doing uh Alin was sort of one of the last conversations I had him reflecting about the end of life and uh spirituality had been trained very much as I said as as in Buddhist to believe like to believe the tenants of

Buddhism um and I asked him do you Believe in God you know do you what happens when you die and he said well you know it's 5050 in a way uh I uh I sometimes believe I really do like to believe I like to believe that uh there's more to life than what you see and that when you die something lives on you accum ulated wisdom your experiential knowledge doesn't just disappear but somehow uh endures lives on he said but then sometimes I feel who knows just like an onoff switch you die And click you're

gone and then he paused and looked at me and said that's why I never like to put onof switches on Apple devices anyway thank you all very much we have a little time a lot of time for a Q&A and um discussion comments correction thank you yeah yes sir if you could briefly take us through the three men Franklin oh Franklin Einstein and jobs and jobs yeah thanks For leaving out Dr Kissinger saves me The Angst um you know there I like writing about the life of the mind I mean other people write about Great

Men of courage or you know people of artistic sensibilities or military or Sports leaders I like to write about people whose minds are interesting but it's not really being smart smart people as you know are a diamond dozen and they don't usually Amount to much what really counts as being imaginative or creative so that's where I think all three of these guys Franklin Einstein and uh jobs they think different they think out of the box um uh obviously they were very different Franklin is very clubbable loves the consensus the wisdom of the people around him

you know in a place filled with passion of John Adams and Sam Adams and all those people he's the one who could bring us together and say we each Have to part with some of our demands if we're going to make something that'll hold together and he's the calm wise Sage person Einstein is truly The outof the-box Thinker the who's sitting there because he's you know can't get a job couldn't even get a teaching job or even a doctoral degree from the Zurich Polytech so he's out on the streets he's a third class examiner in

the Swiss patent office and all the world of physics is trying to figure out why is The speed of light constant and there's this guy Einstein sitting there on the stool looking at patent applications to synchronize distant clocks and you have to send a signal between them and he realizes that if you're moving real fast the synchronization will look different because the signals will get to you at different time he said well the reason the speed of light is always constant no matter how fast you're moving is that if you move people in different states

of Motion time is relative time is relative depending on your state of motion this is like an total outof thebox leap that even for 10 years the physics Community still hadn't gotten their head around and figured out but is the true example of thinking different Steve Jobs had a more intuitive wisdom he said that when he came back from that trip to India I talked about he said I learned the limits of Western empirical and rational thought and adopted the intuition the Intuition that you find in The Villages of India this notion of just having

a feel for something and you know that's that was his thing is that he could just look at something he could just look at the design of something not care about market research not be at all like Bill Gates who could process data with a ferocious intensity and speed but Steve you could just say no I like it no you know no I don't like it yes and you know create great products so I found them Quite different but each one had that imaginative spark that sets people apart yes King off of that if if

he was so brilliant about knowing what people wanted but wasn't so brilliant about people individually could you speak about the difference between knowing a macro person versus a marriage or interpersonal relationships and how well he did or didn't do in that well Steve um like everything it was a Great Divide I mean he had um deep strong interpersonal relationships he could charm you he could be intense he could look everybody on the original Mac team I talked to and at the end they uh actually Ian when I was writing the book but after the book

came out and St died they had a meeting they were talking about the book and Steve and they all agreed somebody said well did we like him and they agreed no but we wouldn't for the life of us have given up the Opportunity to have been part of this process that he was totally mesmerizing totally compelling that sort of thing he had great personal friendships relationships had a great marriage you know when he died he surrounded by his wife his four children his sister Mona Simpson so he could have an intense interpersonal relationship was no

sort of fringes of the asger scale with Steve Jobs in fact he was almost too emotionally intense he could just bore Right into you and emotionally know you on the other hand he thought he was special and the rules didn't apply to him and he could be quite tough on people when he was annoyed yeah so um The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs The onean Show by Mike Mike Daisy first of all did he see it and did he Steve did he actually see it no Steve JS wouldn't know right I I didn't

think he would um but I was curious to know and I didn't see it in the book whether You talked to him about the fox con controversies I did I couldn't get anything out of them there's certain things that Steve Jobs just I mean his strength and his weakness was a total focus a maniacal I will pay attention to this and I won't pay attention to that and you could not get him to focus on things that he did not want to focus upon and he didn't do manufacturing and out you know that was and

that was not something he looked at okay he said well Look you know you can go down philanthropy and China people you know all these things why don't you just wouldn't do it he did do manufacturing you described in the book right no he loved doing manufacturing early on but then he outsources it to China and he's not going to sit there worrying about the conditions at the foxcon factory and you know you can feel what you want about that but you write the biography of the person you're face With and that was Steve Jobs

yeah thank you um you've talked about you've written these amazing books on the personalities very much of these Innovative people including one might argue Henry Kissinger but that's a political debate and the wise men yes exactly remembers that one so what have you learned about the Innovation process from these individuals yeah well you know if there Were an EAS one or two sentence answer to what makes Innovation then we wouldn't have the chance to write 600 page books and have people buy them that's what this book is about which is how are you driven by

both a desire for art art Beauty The Poetry of it and desire to apply that in a practical and Technical way what makes Steve Jobs that way his ability to stand at that intersection was the ability to be a Great innovator to make things that were objects not only of beauty but of emotion I mean people you know fondle their iPhones you know as if they're icons of the church uh and when he dies all over the world I mean you know the type of agulation that we usually reserve for drugged out rock stars and

minor former princesses of England or something you know people even at Occupy Wall Street down in zotti park they're all pausing and building shrines of Steve Jobs a billionaire you know uh industrialist why because there was that emotion that I think he felt but every part of his products conveyed emotion even the P he had a design p a design patent on the packages so that when you that he was in personally in his name and Johnny I's name so then when you open up that box to see the iPhone cradled in there the way

it opens the way it feels I mean he just could do that emotionally yeah John Jonathan talk A little bit Yeah so first of all thank you much the book is is great and I'm excited to be here I'd like to understand a little bit from your point of view about who are the people that Steve Jobs admired so we talked about his dad a little bit he talked about his experience in India but where else did he really draw his influences from who are the people whose voices he heard when he was thinking well

you know I got to know him Particularly well when I was editor of time and we were doing um the people of the century the 100 most influential the person of the century uh we did a party I just found out from I won't say it because but somebody at lunch today that he was really annoyed that Bill Gates got to speak at the 75th Anniversary we're kicking that off and he was there and didn't speak so but while we were picking the people of the century he was Doing the of think different ads G

and we were same people you know was Gandhi Einstein Bob Dylan Picasso and so he was deeply into this process that we were doing and he was trying to get the pictures in fact he was really upset because the picture of Gandhi at the spinning wheel as you may know is a Margaret Bor white picture owned by Life magazine and Life by having it the stipulation could never be used for commercial purposes and he went Ballistic because he couldn't use it the thing different at we finally just overruled the legal department at time life and

it is the picture they have at the thing different Norm pearlstein came down and said he can use that picture so we were doing that and you look at who are the people who think different and he wrote the copy for that ad which is hears to The Misfits the rebels um you know the people who etc etc and it ends with those who are crazy enough to think They can change the world or the ones who do so that was the type of that's his Pantheon of who he admired in particular in music it

was Dylan he felt that Bob Dylan had just constantly reinvented himself and even in the spe the 1965 66 tours where he goes electric you know to Steve that was this great inspiration Bob Dylan as for current people in the real world he likes he liked Mark Zuckerberg because he said look most people who are entrepreneurs They call themselves entrepreneurs and they just created a product and try to sell out the hard thing is not to create a product but to create a company that will continue to create great products Zuckerberg is trying his hardest

not to sell out right away but to create a lasting company uh and you know so it's people like that he admired his mentors specifically people like bill huet um Andy Grove at Intel you know he really now I don't want to get too psycho Babish but you know having felt perhaps you know abandoned to some extent by a father he had a lot of Father figures you know Arthur Rock Andy Grove uh Mike Mara bill huid of huid Packard and he really adopts a lot of mentors and mentoring is important for him yeah hi

I had two questions um first I mean I guess Steve Job know someone who's just very hard to work with and I know he's not been a big fan of the press what is it about you that made him Choose you do you think yeah that was the one qu well I asked him that he said well you can get people to talk and I wanted to feel independent I don't want this to be an in-house book I'm not even going to read it he said I'll have no control over it you just do it

and you're the type people get other people to talk so uh I wanted you he also said and I feel conceited say but he said I also think it should be somebody who's both good as a journalist you know Reporting but also has some historical sense and knows how to deal with archives and that um but why he opened up and why he didn't ask for control and why he wanted to talk that is the one mystery I couldn't quite figure out especially in the past year when it just got deeper and deeper and he

was OB by the end I knew more about him than I knew about myself you know he was really into it and you had a second part and then we'll go here sorry quick question I know you were mentioning the uh Occupy Wall Street element um how is it that someone takes a product that's pretty much packaged and mainstream and Manu ured um like you said he was really an industrialist and make it seem sort of iconoclastic and maintain that image even when it becomes like PR yeah I mean the whole book has the theme

of the counterculture hippus you know new age Steve and the entrepreneurial business technologist Steve and there is a Conflict I mean even one of his previous girlfriends and people he went to India with was like wait a minute you have the Zen mentality and antimaterialism and yet you're creating the greatest consumer objects of Desire ever to understand Steve is to know that there are conflicts within Steve and this is what makes him a very complex dude um to her point about why he chose you um this experience of uh writing this book or Your relationship

with him how did he change you how did he transform you in any way it's a good question Steve was not I mean I'm going to be a little too revealing here perhaps but Steve was not nice and it was randomly not nice to a whole lot of different people you go to restaurants they used to you know people at Apple sometimes would say okay we're going with Steve can you come out because he Would sometimes be so tough on waitresses but if I was there he'd be a little bit less so maybe or something

I found myself knowing that I can be rude Brusque whatever and always trying now to be aware I mean I will never invent the iPod or the iPad but I can be nicer than Steve and so I tried it's a low bar um so I tried to remember how to be you know how to you know be careful on things like that um but there are various other ways I also try harder to Think differently I mean to know that it's the out of the-box solution that can often be the answer yeah did your hours

change watching how he works and how you work no not really I work at night after his death his sister ped an oped where she talked about his last words and she said I wow wow oh wow oh wow as someone who talked to him about his spiritual life a bit I wonder if you have any thoughts about and yeah I was there when that was actually Mona Simpsons's eulogy uh at the funeral um you know and he as he's dying or you know he sort of just stares Beyond everybody and say says oh well

oh well oh well it's a mystery I of course do not know nor does anybody and it's sort of wonderful that Steve who always felt that life was a journey and you never knew the end that it was all a mystery leaves us one more beautiful mystery with his death So um in the process of interviewing him in the process of interviewing him do you think he discovered any anything about himself and if so what was it he were layers after layers the first six months first year it was hard to get underneath and then

he just in some ways we take long walks we just sit in the garden and he would talk and he got very emotional he cried a whole lot um and he tried to understand what made him so emotional he was a very very self Weare Person unlike you know as I said the emotional thing it wasn't like the average Tech geek who can't make eye contact he had trouble not staring you know and getting into your soul and uh I think that depth of emotion is key to who he was and he always tried to

explain it or you know because you'd start by asking the surface questions like you know at times like why are you so mean to people St and then you would just get more and More of that self-reflection about the passions he had and the things that drove him you did he ever acknowledge or admit that he that he made a mistake in not having surgery when they first discovered his uh his cancer well you know we'll never know nobody will ever know his doctors don't know whether the cancer and the um pancreas M metastasized um

you know right away Before they even saw it whether if he had had surgery earlier he would have caught it and he uh knocked it out uh he definitely had those two sides to his personality the counterculture side and the scientific side so there he is doing both he's trying alternative treatments and diets and acupuncture on the other hand he's having his DNA sequenced and right at The Cutting Edge of uh you know really probably the one of the first people Ever to have a full genetic sequencing and then to have tailored drugs done genetically

you know the fact that it took a long time for him to sort of juggle both and then go with the con you know more uh fact-based medicine treatment I think he regretted but he never knew nor could he know if I had only got it and operated on two months earlier we would have caught it wonder how your work with him influenced your definition of leadership Yeah um it made me realize there's not a definition of leadership there are many many styles of leadership that the exact you can read Ben Franklin and Steve Jobs

and see two exact opposite styles of leadership they're both extraordinary individ uals who you know and so there are different ways of doing things and even at the birth of our Republic you needed to have the people I mentioned the adamses who are passionate but you Needed the George Washingtons who are austere and elevated and above everything and you needed the really smart people like Jefferson and Madison and you needed the guy like Ben Franklin who could bring people together so I if somebody says what is the lesson you know they keep asking me why

don't you write a lessons of leadership book or recipes there is no one way of doing it Kissinger had a way the wise men had their own way Franklin Roosevelt had one Way and Harry Truman had a totally different way and they were both good leaders Steve Jobs was the most inspiring technology leader of our day and generation but he was totally different from a Ben Franklin you know and so you can buy a lot of management books this isn't a management book you can buy great leaders ship books that say here you know seven

seven ways to effective leadership I think those books tend to You know be bull I think you have to look at real people in this real world and say Obama can lead This Way Clinton could lead in a totally different way Reagan could lead in a totally different way what are the combinations of elements that can make you effective but there's no one here's the recipe of leadership yeah Rick one of the things listening to you knowing a bit about jobs before you put him into a book one of the things that's Intriguing is whether

or not financial success corporate success was important to him I asked because Apple was one of the companies as you well know which was notable for having had its board and its management manipulate stock options corre and Steve Jobs stock options that were falsified they were back dated he's a guy who comes out with 8 billion dollar net worth uh you're talking about a few I don't know 50 60 80 hundred million dollars at that point it's Peanuts how does he get into that I don't I don't understand what aspect of his personality no aspect

of the personal because once again it's unbelievably contradictory his feelings about money and without accepting exactly all the premises to your question because it's I think it's in the book it's slightly more complicated but you're basic but you're right they got trouble for back dating options the ones they got in trouble for were not Exactly Steve's but he's you know sort of saying I'm working for a dollar a year but then he's getting these options and he said my attitude I asked him about that he said my attitude to money is really sort of I'm

not motivated and I find it an odd thing I was penniless as I'm going through India no money at all can't even buy you know food or something barefoot in India and a few years later I hundreds of millions of dollars because Apple went public I was Very poor very rich so money's not a motivator but then if money's not a motivator and he's proudly working at a dollar a year in fact this past year he worked at a dollar a year and yet he's there worrying about the options and I have in the book

this long thing where he's telling the board if you really value me you would you know get cash in these options give me a new set of options etc etc uh and was it contradictory yes just Like everything I'm saying about Steve there's this great contradiction of you know being anti-materialist and making objects of Desire saying you don't care about money at all but worrying about your options he does not end up I mean his wealth mainly comes from Pixar being bought by Disney I think more than even Apple you know here's somebody who when

he died had created the most valuable company on Earth I mean that's what Apple was I mean uh when Steve stepped Down and uh and he did it from a company that was basically bankrupt when he came back in 1997 on the Forbes list there are dozens of people ahead of him who've created no value for our society certainly haven't created the most valuable company but have had basically done Financial manipulations or whatever or created financial instruments and done something that really is not of value in terms of what they've created so you can defend

or criticize Steve but It's not a simple question his relationship to wealth sorry you were I had you writing a book about someone who's been in the digital world that you're standing sort of at the Confluence of two factors you know right now there's a lot to be said about what's happening uh to to the newsprint world yeah and so I wonder whether you see that conflict as well between sort of a tactile world and a digital world well no I actually think That the world of books journalism just like the world of Music may

have been helped enormously by Steve's Creations I mean we were idiots you know 15 years ago in the journalism business creating time magazines or your paper the New York Times and charging people quite a bit for subscription to it and then taking the entire thing and putting it on the web totally for free and giving it away this is not a business model that makes sense but with the iPad you Can now create apps people simp can pay for them simply you know that you know $299 for iTunes store or constant subscription and so it

gives us a way out of that conundrum of giving away digital content for free whether I get the New York Times online or on paper and I get both is somewhat irrelevant to me I am sitting here you know today reading the New York Times on Steve Jobs's announcement about the textbook industry that he's just I Shouldn't say he has he's no longer with us but that before he died he wanted to up in and it was announced today here's how they're going to do it uh I don't care whether that's on paper or in

print but for the business model to work same with my music I don't care whether I get it on a CD or download it but for the business model to work you have to have some way to pay for it and I think Steve Jobs understood that and there may be hope for us in the last two questions Because I see two hands right there and then there yeah thank you um you mentioned that uh he wouldn't talk about philanthropy yeah so so I'd like to ask you to talk about philanthropy it seems to me

you know the countercultural ethic includes a sense of community and responsibility and and so I guess we have another contradiction here but corre you have speculation on that well yeah I mean the notion of community and Responsibility and giving back were not part of his lexicon his wife on the other hand is a great philanthropist and deeply involved in community and everything else when Bill Gates calls up Steve Jobs I want to be part of the giving pledge Steve won't even call him back I mean he just ridicules Bill Gates to me for this whole

giving pledge sort of thing and I say well look you know you care about education right to St you know Bill Gates is you know leveraging His philanthropy to do wonderful things in the world of education and Steve says you know he's a criminal and just wants to cleanse his name or something all these things Steve would say but he also sort of implies something that today I think was proven true at 10: this morning which is he said in the end for all of what Bill Gates is doing in the field of Education philanthropy

the iPad will do more to change education than any philanthropist ever will I'm going To focus on the iPad and look the iPad is going to transform both How We Do lectures in schools how textbooks are written that whole thing so I obviously believe in philanthropy I believe in community spirit I believe that you do have to be part of something larger than just what you're doing having said that I write the biography about the person who's in front of me and this is what Steve believed last question Yeah thank you for writing a wonderful

book thanks um Steve Jobs wanted his Epitaph to be a great company that lasts to the extent that he ran apple as a fom with a board that caved time again to what extent do you feel like he was getting in his own way how would you handicap Apple's future now that he's going yeah he you know got in his way certainly by 1985 when he's OU it um the question is did he imprint into the DNA of Apple that belief and beauty and Design connected to amazing feats of engineering so that it endures not

only for the next decade but let's say the next few Generations the way Disney did and Disney wal Disney was not a nice guy either and by the way that company went through a lot of rough patches but he did ingrain in the DNA the notion of beauty and creativity and the Miracle of the imagination as Walt Disney would say with you know and so that works when Steve goes to his last Meeting of the apple board when he's stepping down in August uh after he reads his letter of stepping down some people on the

board start making fun of HP he had Packer that day having folded its tablet and gotten out of the PC business whatever and Steve says wait a minute Bill huet gave me my first job when I was 13 years old and he and David Packard thought they had created a company that wasn't just going to make great products Because they moved from you know oscillators to calculators to computers or whatever they continued to always innovate and they thought they had left a company that would do that and these bozos messed it up don't let that

happened to Apple because in the end nobody's ever remember for a product or two they created but they will remember a century from now that we created a company that continually made good product I think that he really has Ingrained that in the current leadership at Apple Johnny IV is awesome Tim Cook Scott forestall Phil Schiller Eddie Q they get it I think you know what happens 10 years from now I don't know he was as you said somebody who ran rough shot and therefore probably didn't lead corporately by the book you know there's no

let's separate the CEO from the chairman and have no no Steve used his board as it best a sounding board so He's not that way but he did create I think a company that does value this particular thing not putting profits over the product but putting the Perfection of the product and the beauty of the product first and uh I think it's quite an inspiration in the time most companies are profit maximizing by making products that turn out to be Commodities thank you all very much I will um go outside and anybody wants to I

will sign books if you don't We'll just continue talking