Steve Jobs: The Authorized Biography with Author Walter Isaacson

[MUSIC PLAYING] Welcome to Decoding Tech from the Computer History Museum. Today's conversation is from 2011 and recorded only a few months after Steve Jobs passed away. His award-winning biographer, Walter Isaacson, joined John Holler, CHM CEO at the time, to discuss one of the most celebrated figures in computer history. This CHM live event was recorded at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, on December 13, 2011. To watch a video of this program, please visit the Computer History Museum's YouTube channel. [MUSIC PLAYING] Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming Walter Isaacson. How great it is to be here at the computer. Thank you for your museum. Well, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful place. Can I give a shout out to Steve Wasney at? Well, I just saw him. His wife Joyce was. And stand up. [APPLAUSE] Andy Hartzfeld next door, my thank you. So all the history is here, totally intimidating me, because I'll keep looking over, and they'll be going nodding or shaking their head. No, no, no, no. It wasn't that way, exactly. But, chef, I look over there. That's for my cues. This is a Silicon Valley crowd-waltor. They won't be that polite. Oh, dear. [LAUGHTER] Well, we're so happy to have you here. Thank you. Appreciate it. Let me ask you about your very, very first meeting with Steve Jobs. 1984. You described yourself as a junior editor at a time. He comes to New York to demonstrate the Mac and Tosh. And you see both sides of Steve, that absolutely passionate side, because there he is with the original Mac, that thing sitting there that almost looks like it's smiling at you. He makes sure that the strip up there, he shows us how thin it is, so it looks like a friendly face, not an e-end or a thaw face. And he shows us all the graphical icons. And you can tell he's passionate about every pixel. He's also furious at Time Magazine. Tells us that we're not nearly as good as Newsweek, that somebody I won't name his name, because he lives here, had written a horrible story about him. And so I saw the petal inside. And that's when I first started to realize that the sort of impatience and patriotism that you sometimes saw in Steve Jobs was connected to the passion and the perfectionism. You were meeting incredible people. You have met incredible people during your career. Was there something special about that encounter? Did he make a particular impression on you at that moment? I must have met I was mesmerized by him. He's a very compelling person. I mean, you saw it there. That's what he was then. And he's telling you these stories. He was up for man. He was mad because he had not been made mad in the year for the end of 1982. I, of course, have been an idiot on the wrong side of that and I'd voted for Paul Volker. None of you remember who Paul Volker was. But we had done the machine move, Zant. It was sort of a machine of the year. And so-- but you could tell the first time you met Steve Jobs that there was something compelling about him. So Flash Forward 20 years, it's 2004, and he gets in touch with you. Yeah, it gives me a call. And I just joined the Astrid Institute. We talked a little while. I said, do you want to come speak at Astrid? He said, no, but I want to come take a walk with you. And after a while, he says, why don't you do a biography of me? He sort of suggests it. I had done Ben Franklin was just finishing Albert Einstein. So I thought, OK, Franklin Einstein, Steve, it's a-- I'm sure that was on his mind. But I admit, I said, you're a really, really great subject. But let's wait 30 years until you retire. And it wasn't until 2009 when he had his liver transplant went on that medical leave that it sort of sunk in that he was fighting cancer, that he had transformed with his team a wide variety of industries, first home computing and personal computing. But by that point, by 2009, had transformed the music industry with iTunes and the iPod, the way we listen to music, the phone industry, the publishing industry, tablet computing. So that's when I said, all right, this is too good to pass up. Did you have a theory about him going into this? I had a theory because his very first phone call when we started talking about it. He told me something that Edwin Land had said to him, which is that you always want to stand at the intersection of liberal arts and the sciences. Right there between the humanities and the humanities and technology are engineering. And that's something we kind of lost in the CP snow era, where you know, either we're in the humanities or you were in the sciences. And my theory among others was that connecting creativity to wonderful feats of engineering was what made him so magical. You wrote something in the book. I was just a quote. His passion for perfection led him to indulge his instinct to control. So I want to talk to you about the editorial control question because you must have had to raise that and settle it fairly early on. How did you manage to do that? I was stunned because it never really came up. And then after a while, he kept saying, well, your book is your book, I'm not even going to read it. He did say, by the way, people don't read books. So I don't-- but it yours. And by the way, I wanted to be honest. I want you to interview people who didn't like me, as well as people did. And he said that he was brutally honest. His whole life, he said, he did not want it to feel like an in-house book. He wanted to feel like an independent book. And therefore, he was going to exercise no editorial control. Did that ever change? Did he ever call you up and say-- Well, the one time he did, which fits into a series of people who don't read books, but they look at them, is Simon and Schuster about a year ago put into the catalog sort of a cover design, just that was a placeholder. And it was a cover of Steve and an Apple, with I. Steve as a title. I landed in San Francisco Airport, coming to a product launch that he was going to do. I can't remember which one, but maybe the iPad. And I saw the thing you least like to see on your iPhone, which is six or seven missed calls from Steve Jobs. So you all know the San Francisco Airport. I'm standing there right in the concourse. I had returned. And he just starts yelling at me. He said, you have no taste. And the title is gimmicky, and it's just ugly. And I don't even want you to come to the demonstration. I'm holding the phone. And finally, he says, I'm not going to continue to cooperate unless you allow me to have input into the cover. All right. Now, it took me somewhere between a second and a second and a half to say, sure. Here's the greatest design I, for something like that. And he spent a lot of time just trying to make it a very simple clean cover. And so that was the one time I felt there's wrath and also the one time when he had editorial input. You talk a lot about-- and you quote his friends who coined the term reality distortion fields. Did you find yourself getting sucked into that from time to time as you started working with him? Well, I think you'd be the last to know. Reality distortion field-- I mean, the Andy Wrights about it and talked to me about it. And Revolution of Alley, but it was-- the engineer's there comes from a Star Trek series, which is simply by thinking something and being convinced of something, even if it's impossible, you can convince other people. And then the secret of the reality distortion field is that it sometimes works. That you convince people they can do the impossible. Was, talked about that to me in his own book, about Steve saying, you'll have to do this in four days. I think it was one of the Atari games they were doing. And was it can't be done? And Steve said, you can do it. And that was a reality distortion field. And four days had been done. So the question of whether I got sucked into it, I found myself deeply, emotionally vested with him. I tried very hard to be honest in the book, to put all things and all sides in the book. But there will probably-- I mean, this will be people in this audience. They will know more than most. If you read the book and say, boy, this guy got caught in the reality distortion field, I guess the answer would be yes. So one final question about the process of writing the book. And then the one we want is sort of the-- What do you want? Steve. You had the luxury of a kind of long historical detachment from Einstein, from Benjamin Franklin, not so much with Kissinger. But here you are suddenly writing a biography of a very compelling living person up close and personal with him in 40 interviews. How does a biographer maintain that kind of necessary? detachment that you could enjoy just by not being able to spend time with Einstein or Franklin. Well, a couple of things. You know, when Steve did his Stanford speech, he said, "Let me tell you three stories. That's just three stories. You become a storyteller. You don't try to preach. And I just tried to let the stories tell themselves." One of the things I discovered by having so much time with him, and so much time with 150 other people who work with him, was how much more we know, or I could know about him than I did about Benjamin Franklin or Einstein. And we thank you, you know, Benjamin Franklin wrote a lot of letters, 40 volumes of papers, Einstein. They're still compiling his papers. So we should know more, but like the flying the kite in the rain. You know, we got one little journal entry with us, maybe a newspaper clip. But with Steve, everything that happened, I'd hear about it at great length, and then hear other people's versions of it. And I probably ended up knowing maybe a thousand times more about him and each story in the book than you would doing somebody who you're doing it through letters or journals. Let's talk about the storytelling now. And the place I'd like to begin is his partnership with Wise Nian. It starts with that very early days. The Blue Box. Right. Well, it starts at Atari, actually, doing games where Steve is on the night shift, because they find it easier to work with him if he's on the night shift. And he learns a lot at Atari, including the notion of how to juice up chips and make them do amazing things, and also simplicity. I mean, you have to remember that games like Pong and Breakout and Star Trek, they had to be so simple that a stone freshman could figure them out. So there's like the instructions were insert, quarter avoid, cling on, or something. And so that simplicity got embedded in him. Then at one point, you have one of the few copies at the computer history museum of the Blue Box, which was started, I think, when Esquire Magazine wrote about Captain Crunch and the phone freakers who could replicate the bell system's tones, and thus make free phone calls. And so Wise and Steve Jobs said, "We got to do this. Went to Slack, the Stanford linear accelerator, you know, library there, found the bell system manuals, and made an analog version of that that didn't quite work. Wise goes off to Berkeley, but it is first semester there, is able to make the first digital version of it. And there, you see the partnership. And I, unfortunately, I can't see Wise whether he's shaking his head or not. But Wise comes up with this amazing circuit board. But of course, you know, loves to show it off. Steve says, "We can package it, and we can sell it, and make money." So they start going door to door and rooms in Berkeley, selling this thing. At one point, testing it out by, I think, calling the Vatican and Wise pretended to be Henry Kissinger, saying that he was at a summit meeting, indeed, it's to speak to the Pope. I can see Wise is nodding at this one. As far as I can tell, they never really got the Pope on the phone that the entire College of Cardinals was smart enough, eventually to figure out it was not Henry Kissinger calling. But, you know, they showed the thing off. And Steve told me when he described that story and the whole blue box story that if it hadn't been for the blue box, it wouldn't have been Apple. That's pretty profound. And why did he feel that way? What was the thing that they could do together that they have been? Very complimentary, meaning they complemented each other well. I mean, he would say of Wise that he could 50 times better than any engineer could have meetings in his head and designed great circuit boards. Wise had been taught by, you know, his father, being an engineer is the highest calling. So he never thought about, maybe we should put it in a package. Maybe we should get, you know, great case, or maybe we should get a good power supply and integrate it. Maybe we can sell it at twice or three times the cost of our materials. And so what Steve did was, as he did his whole life, take really great ideas and come up with a great vision and pull it all together to do something amazing. And I think that was a perfect partnership for somebody who was, you know, could design a circuit board with one quarter of the number of chips that any other engineer would take to make it work. And we were talking earlier too about the process of invention is not a singular endeavor. It's not the one person sitting in a room finding out that, uh, we're talking about the James Miley book, to be honest. Yeah. Yeah. It really is about, it's about that collaboration. Have you, when you think of Einstein, for example, was there a relationship? Have you, have you found through history and is a journalist that these kinds of relationships recur over and over? Are you fine, was the act in jobs? You find other people who are? No, not always. And with Einstein, it was a true solo act, especially the greatest of most elegant of theories of the 20th century general relativity. He's pacing alone in his apartment in Berlin for months on end. And unlike most other physicists of the time, Max Plank, Niels Bohr, he didn't form a school and wasn't collaborative. Steve, even though he was sometimes tough on people, truly created teams like the original Macintosh team of which Andy was a part that were bonded together as if they were pirates and a pirate band. And Steve was able with his both inspiring way and demanding way to create collaborative teams. And he's done that as he did that his whole life. I mean, even now for the past eight or nine years at Apple, you've had an intensely loyal, great collaborative team. So Apple gets up and running. They start with just so I can give a shout out to everyone. I wonder what products are all our friends here. Yeah, the Apple won, showing that that was what you heard on the tape where they go, pervade to Paul Terell at the bite shop. It gets up and running when they create that circuit when was creates a circuit board and then they put it all together. Steve decides they have to incorporate in fact they sold today at Safabese for one point some odd million, one point six million. Yeah, the would run Wayne Steve jobs and was the act signed when they put together Apple the way Steve tells me the story he had worked on the all one farm a commune run by people would read college where they had all dropped out of read going to this Apple farm. He was there tending to the grave in Sneen Apples and had come back from the Apple farm and says, okay, we're going to create a company and they you know gets all excited that you know not only we're going to make a product will have our own company and they couldn't figure out what today. I'm also to execute tracks and matrix and personal computer thing but Steve says what about just Apple Apple computer counter intuitive makes your head snap a bit but kind of friendly has a whiff of the counter culture but it's also it's as American as pie and I think says if we can't think of a better name within the day will register to its Apple computer and they said and by the way I guess in front of Atari in the phone book. It's important marketing angle. So they begin to work on the Apple one Apple is growing they're putting together this team early in the the early history of the post incorporation period but there's another ingredient that has to come along to make it work right my mark. Well first of all you need money right because what they're doing is going from the Apple one to the apple to you notice among the differences you know Jerry Manick and others create I mean what's a man but you'll create a beautiful case they need the plastic molding it's going to cost a lot of money to do it you can't just sell your VW bus and your HP calculator the way they did to get the Apple one. So they need investment capital and Mike Markle comes along signs a line of credit but also gives them a great piece of give Steve a great piece of advice which is a marketing document with three concepts on it one is to focus really you know keep your focus the other is empathy not the perfect word for it but it's basically making a most. So basically make an emotional connection with the people going to buy your products and then the third is also not a great word the words impute but it means cast an aura around whatever you do so that the minute you you know Steve even throughout this career had his own personal name on the patents for the boxes the packaging of the Apple product so when you opened up and there was that iPod you it imputed that it was something really cool just the way it was and that's what the Apple to does it imputes at it's a really cool machine well and even is primitive is it looks to us today he obsessed with the curve of the corners on the edges and the champers and all the design and the plastic you know he had done been fascinated by the Sony style. In the very, right when they move out of the garage, they're in sort of a little office. And next door is a Sony showroom. And he would fondle the brochures. Then he went to Aspen Design Conference. He got invited. And really, having grown up in a Joseph Eichler house, and I know Joseph Eichler's grandson is here selling the books with Kepler, but those Eichler homes were sort of mass-marketed, simple, Frank Lloyd Wright style homes for the Every Man. But it was simplicity. And it was that Bauhaus style of make it simple, but the simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. And so clean, white, simple, that becomes a style for Apple. It's about this time, as Apple grows, as a company, the Apple II takes off there selling hundreds of thousands of units. The phrase in the book surfaces temperamental and bratty. And it seems at this point there's a kind of breakout, a very particular kind of breakout at this point, where that side of jobs, that's sort of very petulant, I think, is the word use a lot. Temperamental and bratty is how other people described it. And it starts to grate on people, right? I think you're right in the search. Well, he was temperamental. I mean, that's why he was on the night shift at Atari. There wasn't something new. But temperamental people also have the temperament of an artist, which is why you have a passion to have in control of a product and make it perfect. That temperamentalness, there was an original president like Scott, Scottie, sort of tried to temper jobs and didn't work too well. Eventually they bring in John Scully. He was a very polite gentleman to try to handle Steve. But with Steve, you got the whole package. The temperamentalness was a part of it. And it showed just in how he cared. Even, I tell the story in the book, with Steve walking me by his house that he grew up in. The house where he was very young. And his dad, he built a fence with his dad. And he showed me the fence. And we touched it. And he said, my dad taught me to make the back of the fence as beautiful as the front. And I asked my dad, why? Nobody will ever see it. Nobody ever know. And my dad said, but you will know. And that's why even on the Apple II, he wants a circuit board to be beautiful. And when they get to the Macintosh, the next one over, even though you cannot open it, he holds it up for a while because the chips on the circuit board are not neatly aligned. And when they say, but nobody can open it, nobody will know. He says to the Mac designers, but you will know. And the other thing that's interesting, talking about Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, and those two things, is Steve Jobs had the passion of an artist to have end to end control. Hardware, integrated with software, don't open it up. Woz's view was much more open than we could license out the software. But on the Apple II, I think it had eight slots. You could jack into it. You could put stuff into it. You could open it up. You could get to the circuit board. And Steve was against Steve Jobs as against having slots. He wanted, as an artist would, you know, he wouldn't want Bob Dylan saying, let's have an open source on my lyrics, you know, everybody can put the words they want. He didn't like people jacking and opening up. Woz kind of insists that he wants the Apple II to have these jacks, the slots, but the Macintosh doesn't. And the Macintosh doesn't even have screws that you can use to open it up. And that was very Steve Jobs' light. All the way through his career, really believing and tightly controlling, like the gardens of Kyoto that he loved to visit, carefully curated, carefully walled, carefully tended by one artist's sensibility. So let's move now to the Macintosh era. So much is going on at Apple at that point. There's so much growth. And his personal courtship of John Scully begins. Can you talk a little bit about that on the-- It was a-- It was a bad mistake. I mean, it was almost like he saw John Scully a bit as a father figure or a mentor. Scully really wanted to be cool and hip and wanted Steve's approval. And it was for a while the famous line, I think, is at the San Remo apartment that Steve is thinking of buying. And he brings John Scully up in New York that are looking over Central Park and Scully's demuring. And Steve says, do you want to spend the rest of your life? Because Scully was at Pepsi selling sugar water or do you want to change the world? And so Scully comes. And Scully is a man of preps school sensibilities, great manners, very kind. But it's hard for him to deal with conflict. Steve felt the price-- I mean, I'd say why were you-- so Tuffy said, well, the price of admission to being with me is that I got to be able to tell you you're full of it. Actually, he used the word with two more letters and yet. And you got to be able to tell me I'm full of it. And we're going to really duke it out. And Scully was not that way. Secondly, Scully was basically a marketer. And having run Pepsi US, he didn't sit there worrying about the product. He was not fiddling with the formula for Doritos and saying, I can make this insanely great, this Dorito. It was shelf space marketing. And I think Steve, after a while, felt that Scully just didn't get into how awesome the Mac was. And then it didn't help that the Mac, even though it wasn't insanely great, Scully priced at almost $2,500. It did not sell very well. Microsoft started licensing out its copied version of the graphical user interface and started dominating the computer business. And so I think their relationship was doing fine, as long as Apple was doing fine. And the Apple too was the workhorse. It was making the money for the company. But the Mac didn't. And so there was a horrible falling out that culminates on Memorial Day of 1985. Before we talk a little bit more about the falling out in the post-85 period, let's talk about the invention of the Mac and Tosh itself, the design itself. And this is the point in the book where you insert the great famous quote from Jobs, "Good artist copy, great artist steel," which he took from Picasso. And then he would add, "And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas." That quote is often associated with the genesis of the Mac and Tosh, because of Xerox Park and the graphical interface. So they take two visits to Xerox Park. And as you know, Xerox had come up with a concept of the desktop metaphor, the graphical interface. More importantly, sort of a bit-napped design, and each pixel on that screen could be mapped to bits in the microprocessor. And so you could make a beautiful machine. You and I are all left to remember. And certainly if you're not, you can go into this museum here. To remember what you have to do, those green phospholedders, C-promps with C-colon, backslash, whatever command. It was god awful. And suddenly, at Time Magazine, we get the Mac. And you can click in the document. You can drag and drop. So I do a whole big section on both the visits to Xerox Park. And I think the misconception that they just talk the graphical interface from Xerox Park. Because it takes two years of the most amazing designers, including Andy and others on the team, to take what the metaphor that Xerox used and to really make it great. You have to remember, Xerox came out with a star two years before the Mac came out. I think it sold like seven copies in all of America. I mean, it was a clergy bad machine. What they did when they took that metaphor was say, oh, we'll take the mouse with three buttons and totally simplify it. And you'll be able to click and drag and drop and double click and open things up. We'll invent pull down menus and Bill Adkinson invent skill clipping where you can have documents sort of looking like they're on top of other documents. So it looks like a messy desktop where you can do things. So none of that was in the Xerox original graphical interface. So I think, first of all, they take the Xerox metaphor and actually make it insanely great. Secondly, TSLE, its line, their falls the shadow between the conception and the reality. Well, they were able to execute on it, which Xerox and others wore. But it is true that part of Steve's genius was looking at 1,000 ideas at any given point and saying, that one's great. This one sucks and this will get ignored. But pulling together ideas, including ideas from Xerox Park. And this is one of the times where he's pushing this team incredibly hard. I mean, the Solution field is then coined by-- I mean, at that point, one of the engineers, I think Larry Kenjian, whose name is in charge of the boot up of the machine. And Steve says, it's taken too long to boot up. You got to save 10 seconds off the boot up time. Reality distortion field. The guy says, you can't. It's actually a really elegant piece. of code, I can't shave 10. And Steve says, if you could save a human life, would you shave 10 seconds off? And Kenyan goes, well, yeah. So Steve goes, he's a whiteboard or whatever, and says, all right, say there are a million Macintoshers and say it's 10 seconds every time somebody boots up. And in the given year, it's done this number of times. And he multiplies it out and says, you can save this number of lives every year if you shave off 10 seconds. An example of the reality distortion field working within four weeks, Larry Kenyanan shaved off 28 seconds. Everything about that. You see the screen? It's a rounded rectangle. I think it's Bill Atkinson. I'll get corrected if I get some of the names wrong. But I think it's Atkinson who's doing what's called the primitives that you can easily put on the screen. So he does a square, which is easy in a rectangle. And then he does a circle, which is hard because the microprocessor doesn't do square roots, but he figures that out of way to do a circle. And Steve says, yeah, but you need not only a rectangle in a circle, but a rectangle with rounded edges. The guy says, well, no, that's can't be done. And why do we need it? And Steve makes them walk around the parking lot in the neighborhood, pointing to things like windshields and billboards and don't know parking signs and screens of computers saying rounded rectangles over people see every day. They're more beautiful to look at. Atkinson or have a came up with a primitive to do a rounded wreck. And even those thin pinstripes on the pull down menus fredded over them. Even the Susan Care doing the fonts. I mean, Steve was there because he had taken that calligraphy course when he dropped out of read, caring about the spacing on each one of those fonts. The perfection that he was seeking at that point and the almost impossible task, he was asking people to perform engendered in the book as you report it to two completely different camps. It seems to me of people who worked for jobs at that point. But Trouble says he push you, you'd be better for it. And then there are others who say worst experience of my life. If you balance, not only in this case, but in other cases too, the number of people you encounter who felt one way, tremendous affection and the number of people who felt another way, what would you say that there's a? Well, there are actually three categories because a lot of people felt both. Yeah. That it was a really agonizing experience and the best experience. But especially with the Macintosh team, or even with the team today, the overwhelming number say he push me to do things I never thought I could do. He drove me nuts at times. It was the greatest experience in my life. So it premieres. It's a great commercial. The legendary commercial. Talk a little bit about his view of the creation of the 1984. 1984 ad is interesting because in Steve Jobs's soul, you do have the heart or soul of a member of the counterculture, a rebel, a misfit. In fact, even the thing different I had to start with, here's to the rebels, the misfits, those who think different. The 1984 ad is, I think, an incredible, in cultural landmark and icon. Obviously, because of the all well novel, we had been thinking up until then of computers as being centralizing and controlling in the province of the Pentagon and the power structure and big corporations, the notion that a computer could be personal and empowering to the individual had grown up a bit in opposition to that, sort of the Stuart Brand, whole earth catalog of view of computers for the people. And Steve was in that mentality. He also liked to think of himself as part of the hacker ethos. Now, the problem with him thinking himself as a hacker ethos is, as I said, he doesn't want slots. He doesn't want it to be open. He doesn't want you to be able to hack in. So in some ways, he's violated the hacker ethos by creating an appliance that you can't open up, as opposed to, hey, put your own software in here and plug things in. But he wants to assert that I'm still part of that hacker ethos fighting the establishment. And that's that amazing ad, Ridley Scott, who had just unblade around her films in London. And it's the woman being chased by the thought police and all the droids are there and she have big brothers on the screen droning and she finally throws the hammer in it. Decimates big brother and then says, you know, Apple will introduce Macintosh, Find Out Why 1984, Won't Be Light 1984. So they show it at a board meeting and all the board members are like this at the end. I think it was Phil Sline of Macy's, California, finally says, who makes a motion that we find a new ad agency? Scully is so frightened of it. He decides he's going to order them to sell back the advertising time on the Super Bowl and not run the ad. Steve is furious. At one point shows the ad to Waz and Waz says, why don't we just chip in and pay for the ad? They don't really, you know, on the Super Bowl. They don't really need to because Lee Klau and the wonderful people who are what becomes Chayet Day or changes his name every few years, who had made the ad. Lee Klau, a beach bomb of a brilliant genius who had helped do the ad and been a guru of advertising at Apple ever since, sort of says, we can't sell the time back. They just sort of defy and just somehow don't sell the time back. So the ad runs-- runs really only once or once nationally. But it becomes by many estimates including TV God and advertising age, the best advertisement of all time. It doesn't sell well. Yay. We should show it. You have it here. We can get the rights to show it. It's unusually. I know. And it shouldn't be on YouTube. Oh, well, it goes anyway. We can play it off YouTube. John wants to try to bring that up. So wonderful, commercial, great premiere doesn't sell well. Steve's removed from running the Macintosh division. That begins the end. Right. For him, his relationship with Scully, there's a massive blow up at the end. In fact, you go in the book day by day. Seven days in May, boy. Faithful week in May. And it's talking everybody there. And Steve, twice during that week, tries to counter-coup, brings people up to his house and would side. They all sort of sort of plot, but they know that Steve probably should not take over the company. And it's one of the great learning experiences. But he feels abandoned. He was going through a period of wondering because he had been adopted about abandonment and father figures. And he has on the board, Arthur Rock, who had been a father figure, Mike Markola, been a father figure, John Scully. And they all go around the room and vote against him and abandon him. And he really takes it hard. How does he recover from that? When he talked to you about that period, pretty dark time, what did he say? Well, he described vividly every single day of that week, including where the food came from when he was serving it on the patio when they're trying to bring Mike Markola around. So it's still seared into his mind. And this is almost 25 years later. Yeah, this is Memorial Day weekend of 1985. He goes to Europe for a while, bicycles around with-- he then talks to some people and comes up with a concept of doing next computer. And by the end of '85, has recruited a handful of people from Apple, causing a loss. I mean, this is really bad at this point because the board and Scully and all think, OK, you're stealing our people. And he creates next. He says in his Stanford speech, and he said to me, being fired at Apple was the best thing to happen to be. It liberated me. It helped me change. I actually think it was the experience at next that in some ways liberated him and matured him more. Why was that? Well, you know, at next, there was no board of directors sitting on him. There was no CEO brought in. He could indulge every instinct. So his instinct for design, he gets Paul Ran, the grand old designer of logos. So I think $100,000 just to do the next logo before they even have anything. He gets a beautiful headquarters with a patented staircase. You can see him now in Apple's stores. But everything had to be-- he wanted his own factory. He wanted the next to be a perfect cube. And those of you who've been involved in computer manufacturing know, usually there's sort of a draft angle that means it's 91 degrees or so so that you can actually pull it out of the mold. It's exactly 90 degrees. It's harder to get-- no, exactly 90 degrees. And it meant they had to do a special manufacturer. It had to be matte black. Everything about it was-- You know, him indulging is insane drive for perfection, including building the factory, having it in pure white, and having it be robotic. So it is a glorious machine that's an absolute market failure. And at the very first Macintosh offsite, he does a series of maxims on the whiteboard. And the first one is don't compromise. That's a great inspiring maxim. It's also not really a great way to run a business. As Ben Franklin said, compromises may not make great heroes, but they do make great democracies. At a certain point, you have to learn how to make trade-offs. And that don't compromise mentality. He had it for a while until he finally realized, you don't have to compromise your principles, but you have to have some sense of balance. And that's what he learned at next. And simultaneously, was doing Pixar. Pixar is a wonderful example of what we said at the very beginning, the intersection of art and technology. Friend of his had brought him up to George Lucas's-- to meet some of George Lucas's people. Lucas was getting rid of the digital animation software and hardware division he had. Steve thought that was really cool. He thought he can make for consumers, they're build to do digital rendering. That never really took off. But there was one guy working there who's in charge of making shorts to show off how cool the machines were, named John Lasseter. And he made a couple of shorts with a luxur lamp, and then one called Ten Toy. And the rest, as they say, is biography, if not history. It makes one eventually, at least a toy story. So Pixar becomes a transformative thing and the animation doesn't. Now, he says something very profound to you in the book about that period, which is the strain that running Pixar and next simultaneously put on him physically. And he even says, I think that had something to do with my eventually getting cancer. I don't think that's the case. I don't think you get cancer from working hard to stress on. Yeah. But it was a bad one if put-- He felt that way. And he felt there was great stress. He was driving up to Pixar. He was handling. And then, of course, when he goes back to Apple, he's juggling quite a few things. I think that that was a time of great stress in his life and also some unhappiness. Next is not doing very well. Those machines aren't selling. And Pixar-- you have to remember, it was a hardware software company. And nobody's buying the Pixar except for Disney, bought a few Pixar imaging machines. But it's not selling that well. And so for a while, he's hemorrhaging money at both companies. And also, one of the most wildly creative periods, too. I mean, Pixar was producing these phenomenal-- Well, by the time they produce Toy Story, in a longer hemorrhaging money. Right. Yeah. Did he long for Apple during this period? Did he ever really fully give up on the notion that some of the Apple-- No, Apple was his baby. Apple was his child. I don't know that he just longed for it. But he was deeply frustrated that it was being screwed up. That after a while, they weren't inventing new products and the products sucked. And they kept just coming out with more lines of Macintoshes, but not a better machine. They couldn't even create an operating system. A new Mac OS. And so I think he's watching, as people screwed up, the wonderful baby had helped create. And finally, it leads to his triumph in the-- Well, because they can't create an operating system. At a certain point, Gil Emileo, who is then running Apple, says, OK, I got to buy an operating system. And you know, it's at the BOS, which is Jean-Luc Gassais. He looks at even Microsoft, the question of adopting Windows. That would have been weird. [LAUGHTER] And then there's this amazing operating system that Avi DeVanian and Steve Jobs had done it next with a Unix kernel to it, which is exactly what Apple needed. And so eventually, Apple decides they have to buy next to get the operating system. But you buy next to get the operating system. You also buy next to get Steve Jobs. And as I'm not sure it was Waza who said it, but I think it was. Gil Emileo meets Steve Jobs game over in tune. Steve Jobs was back in the saddle. Well, in fact, he tell that whole story. Emileo tried to resist that, but he just found himself game over and drawn in the reality distortion field kicks. And then begins, maybe arguably, one of the greatest decades that any corporation has ever done. First of all, he creates-- with the new operating system, he brings Bill Gates, his doppelganger, his part of the binary star system. He had that falling out. Love, hate, relationship. Gates comes back, makes an investment, starts making Microsoft Word, and excelling others for the new Mac OS. But he also truly focuses on design. You'll remember, and you probably have it here, but not on stage, the first iMac. I mean, he beats Johnny I when he first goes back to Apple in 1997. And they form this bonding. And they create the iMac. Johnny I've sketches it out. Looks almost like a rabbit that is hopped upon your desk. Steve says, that's not good, but they keep playing with the model until they have it beautiful. They make it translucent beyond the blue. They even go to jelly bean factories to say, how do you make it look right? It lets you see the circuit board inside to see how neat that circuit board is. And Johnny I've even comes up with a notion, even though it's a big desktop machine, and putting a recessed handle. And the engineers say, well, that's good cost too much money. You don't need a handle. Why would you want a handle? You're not supposed to pick it up. And what Steve and Johnny intuitively understood was that computers were still intimidating to people. But the handle gives you permission to touch it. It says, I'm at your service. And so just by having that recessed handle, even if you didn't use it, you felt that the computer was being deferential to you. So that beautiful design, when they finally have flat screens, they take the iMac and Johnny design something with a-- and Steve says, no, no, no, integrity to the flat screen. You've screwed it up. And he goes home. Johnny comes back to his-- to Steve's house. In the backyard, Lorena's planted all these sunflowers. They walk around trying to figure out what to do. And finally, you get that beautiful iMac that's just a little dome with the sunflower neck so that it has integrity to it. And everything they do, whether they're playing with plastic or titanium or metals, it's distinguishing Apple from those commodity machines that Dell and HP and Compact were turning out. So once he writes the ship with that strategy, when he goes back, he makes a kind of incredibly bold decision, which is-- 2001. Yeah. It's not going to be a computer company anymore. You know, they used to take the top 100 and go off on retreats and say, here's what we want to do next. And everybody would fight to get on that list. And finally, they'd get the list to 10. And then Steve would cross off the bottom, 6 or 7, and say, we can only do four. And it was stay focused when he went back to Apple. That was it. Focus on four things-- desktop, laptop, home, professional. We're not going to make 20 lines of Macs. We're going to make four. And so that focus. But then when he nails it and he gets that right, at the top of the list is maybe consumer devices, products. And what he does is he realizes that by having end-to-end control of the hardware and the software, you can create a digital hub where you can put your video camera by firewire, connect it to your computer, and manipulate your video, create a DVDs. The one thing he screwed up slightly was he wanted a trace slot in the new iMac. And he was furious when-- not really, I'm sorry. He wanted one of those pure slots. And when they put a tray in, he was furious. And he made him eventually change it to just a slot. But it meant you couldn't burn music CDs when Panasonic and others came out with the burning of CDs. And he was so focused, the notion of focus, focus, focused, he was focused on video. So they're doing IDVD and that sort of thing. He calls up Adobe and says you've got to make your video editing software for the new Mac OS. And unlike Bill Gates, who said yes and came down and made Microsoft for it, the people of Adobe said, no, you got too small of a market share. And as you know, he never quite forgave Adobe, which is why Flash doesn't work on your iPad. But the mark of a true genius of a company is not just when you think of things first. But when you actually failed to think of something first, can you leapfrog? Can you catch up? And so he realizes he had gotten aced out of the music business. That others were making CD burner trays. And people are, you know, all of us were making, you know, downloading music from Napster and making playlists and burning CDs and you couldn't really do it that well on the Apple. So he had to leapfrog and he says we're going to do it by making a perfect end to end thing with a jukebox software which is iTunes, the store in which you get your music, the device itself and when they start making the iPod, he makes it so simple because it's end to end integrated with the whole thing. You can take some of the complexity and put it on the Mac or put it in the iTunes software so that the device itself is not one of these complicated MP3 players where you had to figure out how to do it. You could just look at it with that tracked wheel and it was intuitive and he kept saying I want to be able to get to wherever I want, whatever song I want, whatever function I want in three clicks and I want it to be intuitive and he drove him and drove him and drove him until the iPod becomes perfect and that's when he leapfrogs and does the music but it takes Apple from being Apple computer, they even change the name to just Apple into being in the digital hub business. First, you know, with DVDs and video, then really big with the iPod and music and the iPod is hugely successful so he starts to worry what's going to kill it and he realizes people putting music on their phones will kill it. So, focuses and does the iPhone and does it at first, they do two versions of the iPhone, one with sort of a iPod modify with the tracked wheel which wasn't very good for a phone and then with Johnny I have many other people and go to it on by Microsoft and an engineer there that Steve didn't like. This notion of a touchscreen technology and when he finally sees how the touchscreen can work he says that doesn't, that's how we're going to do the iPhone. And so you have a series of consumer devices from the decade beginning in 2001, most prominently the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad that totally transform industries. And at the same time he's bending other industries in the direction of his vision. The music industry, Disney. We tell storytellers. He can't buy the fact that he's making these insanely great products and they're being sold in big box stores, you know, by clerk to have no idea what they're doing so he comes up with the notion of the Apple store which is not just a store but a whole branding exercise. And you know it's just that notion of bending industries for the iPod and iTunes store to work, you had to convince seven record companies to put all their music on and disaggregate albums and sell the songs instead of the album. Sell the songs from 99 cents initially. Now the music company is quite well. They had their own press play and you know they were doing their consortia. Obviously Sony was trying to, you know, they'd done the Walkman, they had a great music division. None want to come aboard and Steve personally is like bringing the iTunes software to the time Warner building showing it to Roger Ains at Warner Music, getting him aboard and then getting Doug Morris at Universal. Finally in circling Sony, no other CEO would have been so passionate about just, you know, going at people until they finally surrendered and Sony's the last told out. There's a great story Andy Lack and others told me Andy Lack was running Sony Music at the time. He has the surrender. He has to put Sony Music in. But the one thing that Steve wants is all of Dylan because he and Waz in the early days it's found every bootleg tape that totally Dylan fanatics. It's a soundtrack of Steve's life. Dylan is a Sony artist. So he wants to do all 772 tracks of Dylan as a virtual digital set that you can buy for $199. Andy Lack at Sony says no I'm going to jab it to him because I need leverage. We're not going to allow Dylan to be out. Steve calls Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan with all to respect to one of the great artists at a time. Slightly spacey so it doesn't quite deal with it. But sort of his manager, they're all trying to figure out Steve Jobs talking into it. Andy Lack finally says to Bob Dylan, I will write you a check for $1 million if you'll stay out of the iTunes store with that box set for a year. And Dylan, I hate to say it because I love Dylan, takes the money. But a year later Andy Lack has moved out of Sony and Dylan's box set not only goes on to the iTunes store. Dylan doesn't iPod add. You may remember it with Silhouettes and Dylan wearing the cowboy hat. You know what? It helps Dylan more than it even helps the iPod. For the first time since 20 years he debuted with an album at the top of the Billboard charts. Because iTunes and the iPod had such a caches that him just doing that ad introduced him to a new generation. You look skeptical about some of those questions. I'm not skeptical. These are actually a lot of excellent questions. My expression is meant to say, where do I start? But let me just ask you one other question before we get into the cards. Which is about the final chapter. You write, if reality did not come port with his will, he would ignore it. As he had done with the birth of his daughter and would do years later when first diagnosed with cancer. I think when I talk to people about the question they most wanted me to ask you tonight. Easily in the top three was why when he was first diagnosed that he undertake all these other natural, non-medical solutions. There are two sides at least to Steve Jobs at all times. Whether it's his personal life, cancer, professional life, or the products he made. There's the counter-culture, sort of alternative, romantic, sensibility of Steve. And there's the hardcore engineering scientific side of Steve. And the cancer was no different. Both sides kick in. And he spends a lot of time wrestling with those two alternatives. Wrestling, you know, with alternative treatments and diets. But also, as I say in the book, it didn't, you know, get as much having his DNA sequenced, having targeted therapies done. Now, unfortunately, it takes some months before he does. What he does in every other aspect of his life is find the perfect synthesis of something that is both very scientific, but also comports with his alternative view of things. And so he does. It takes longer. I don't know. It was implied that had he gotten operated on right away or something. He might have stopped the cancer. I don't, you know, we don't know that. I mean, cancer spreads in mysterious ways. So it's quite likely the cancer had already spread. But it was somewhat typical of Steve to say, "The normal rules don't apply to me. I'm going to look at this from both an alternative viewpoint as well as a deeply rooted scientific viewpoint. Everything in some ways that he does in his life ends up being a synthesis of that hippie rebel with the guy who was in the Hewlett-Packard Geek Explorer's club." It's interesting. I'm going to start with a couple of these questions now. What was the greatest misperception about Steve Jobs in your mind that was addressed or maybe that you could address in this book? I think the greatest misperception came right when the book first came out and people were quickly reading it and point out anecdotes. Is that the petulence and the impatience that were bred into his character from the very beginning was just sort of a weird thing. Instead of part of an inner, I mean, his own personality was integrated, including with his profession and the products he made, just like Apple products are integrated. So that perfectionism and artist temperament, or bratty temperament, we call it artist or bratty temperament, that's not some disconnected little thing that has nothing to do with the passion for perfection or the product drive that he had. So I try, and that's what the last chapter is about, to show how all of this was woven together. So the words like petulence and bratty are also maybe a little euphemistic for some very much stronger words that you use in the book from time to time or time. Well, he uses it. I remember, I was at Time Inc. and at one point fortune was doing a story involving his cancer because they were the ones who reported the cancer treatment for us, not my book. And other things, Steve was furious and called up the editor and the editor in chief. I was there and heard the stories. And finally he says to Andy Sirwell as the editor, "Wait a minute. So what do you have here? You've discovered I'm an asshole. Why is that news?" So he was very so aware that he could be a strong cup of tea. This is an interesting question. Did he have to be who he was in that way? Did you have to be that way, Andy? He asked me to ask you, "Did you have to be that way to get done what you did?" And I'm I'm going to back off a little from giving you a great answer because I'm a storyteller. I had to write about the person who was in front of me. That's who he was, so I wrote the story of him. This is not a how-to book. This is not a manual for, "Do you have to bid this way to run a company?" Well, of course you don't. I mean, they're very nice people who run very successful companies, and they're also total assholes who are total failures at running companies. That said, I am not trying to say, "Here's the way to do it," like Steve did. I am trying to write a book about a flesh and blood human being who I didn't know, all of his aspects, but when I knew them, I tried to tell that story, and part of that story is being driven, or that's you for mystic, and had he not been that way, I doubt he would have been as successful. On the other hand, I suspect there were other ways to get things done at times, but, you know, when you say, "Did he have to be that way?" My only job is to tell you what the way he was, because I'm just a biographer, not a preacher or a management consultant. Do you think that question will be answered with the sort of the luxury of distance and time? I guess Clayton Christensen's another great management guru could probably do a case study of you can take all the Jack Welchers and blah, blah, blah, and say, "I was 60 minutes or saying, "Boson, did he have to be so hard? Did he have to be so tough?" I said, "Wait a minute, you work for Don Hewitt. Don Hewitt was a genius. He was also a real pain in the butt." We all know people like that. I guess you could do a study of nice bosses, tough bosses, jerks, whatever, and correlated somehow with a regression analysis and say, "Here's more successful, but that's way above my pay grade." Are you writing the screenplay and would you choose George Clooney? I am not. I have nothing. The reports of the movie are premature and way over done, and I'm not even talking about it, but I'm not involved. Can you see George Clooney in this role? I am not a movie person. In fact, I had trouble when I was dealing with Steve, Steve went over every frame of Pixar movies, the way he went over every chamfer and curve of the first Mac and Taj, and he would say something about finding Nemo or whatever, and I remember having to go back and quickly download those movies because I just don't know, it's one of my blind spots. In fact, when I was editor of Time, I was famous for making really bad movie cover calls, so asking me who should play what in a movie is. I'll give you a pass on that one. So I'm going to read you the preface on this card. It says on behalf of archivists and historians out there, what were Steve's stipulations about using the interviews you collected for this book, and where will they ultimately be deposited? Yeah, most of them are notes. Some transcripts of the four or five formal interviews he gave me. My notes will go somewhere, maybe we should talk, but not for another 20 or 30 years and not. I mean partly because Steve, and then the people around Steve would say things that could be very hurtful, or they'd say don't you, or they'd say something just off-handed, especially Steve, about certain things, and the things I didn't put in the book, and the things I would have to take out of those, you know, my notes, just because they were unnecessary to understanding Steve, and probably, you know, in the interest of kindness, you don't want to hurt people with certain comments. So I will someday go through my notes, and if it's a 20-year rule, maybe some of the things will have, you know, gone by the wayside. Someone picked up on that quote about great artist steel and said, he said that, yet he resented Bill Gates in Google and many others for many years for stealing from Apple as he saw it. How did his Zinself reconcile this? Steve was not an expert at reconciling conflicting things. Amerson and many others have great quotes about people getting body conflicting thoughts at the same time. Steve was totally ballistic first at Bill Gates in Microsoft for ripping off as he put it, the Macintosh graphical interface, and then of course famously berating and saying it to me in the book with words of one syllable, how he felt Android and Google had ripped off the Apple mobile operating system. You know, did he, no, he didn't try to reconcile that with the fact, but I will say he didn't rip off Xerox. I mean there was a financial deal Xerox invested a million dollars in Apple. There was an exchange of technology. I think, you know, he has some right to feel that he came up or Apple came up with both the beautiful Macintosh operating system and then it pretty much is copied by Windows. And likewise the mobile operating system. You can argue as for 10 years in court, there were an argument about whether you can, you know, copyright or the look and feel whether there's an intellectual property theft there. But I can understand why he was pissed off. Given his Mercurial, there's a great story in the book about Mercurial. I love the word. And Dick the Torial style, how was he still able to engender such creativity and loyalty in his order? First of all, I'll tell the Mercurial story. It's a great story. It's a great story. Part of the self-awareness of Steve, because he was Mercurial. So he's showing off the next computer at Symphony Hall here when it's being unveiled. And among other things, he had helped invent digital books. I mean, they didn't exist. But he put a Thessaurous and all of Shakespeare's work in digital form and next. So he's showing off the Thessaurous and he says sometimes I'm called Mercurial. You know, let me look it up or whatever. And it says, you know, changeable moods, whatever. And it says, Antidim, you know, Satra 9. And then it describes Satra 9, somebody who doesn't have enough emotions, camera, said, well, maybe it's not so bad to be Mercurial, is it? So I think he understood his Mercurial nature and that that was a part of who he was. And having said that, I've now forgotten the second half of the question. It was given that he was that way. Had it engender such creativity and energy. Oh, look, when you're creating a machine as insanely great as that, even if you're in the middle of the night saying this code is socks, you got to make it better. By the time you've created, as an engineer, the original Macintosh, you are loyal to the genius and the vision there. And people who have strong personalities either can turn people off or they can say, hey, I got inspired here and got to be on a team. And look, the proof is, I hate clichés like this, proofing in the pudding. But look at the team he even has at Apple. If he's that bad of a boss, why do so many A players stay with him? Well, because they like to work on a team with only A players. And if he got, if he ran off a lot of B players, that doesn't mean that that team at Apple filled with A players. They're quite loyal to him. You talk a little bit about the relationship between Larry Olson and Steve Jobs. They both describe each other as close parents as that. The Larry says, you know, best friend. It was, you know, a deep friendly relationship. One of my favorite anecdotes is I think late 96 when the question of Steve coming back to take over Apple is first being kicked around. And Larry, Ellison says, why don't we buy Apple? Why don't I launch a hostile takeover? I'll buy Apple. We'll put you back and he'll set it into motion again. We'll all make a lot of money. And Steve finally says, I think I might go back to Apple, but I don't want you to invest. I don't want you to buy it. I don't want me to invest. I want to be able to go back at a dollar a year and no ownership of it. And Larry, Ellison says, but Steve, if you do it and you come back that way and it makes it a great company again, how am I going to make it? How are we going to make money? You know, if we don't invest in it and buy it. And they were walking along a beach and Steve grabbed them by both shoulders and said, Larry, this is why it's important I'm your friend. You don't need any more money. It didn't go that. I'm not doing a couple more questions. First, before I get to those two, let me just ask you quickly about the current technology, this great conversational interface that Siri represents. Siri, did he talk much about that with you? Yeah. What's the vision for that is? Yeah, I mean, I do think that the simple most natural interfaces have always been his passion, and there's no simpler one than just talking. I did not know the name Siri, but we talked a little bit, and I was careful in the book, even though he told me a lot of things that he, in detail, what he wanted to do, I decided, you know, I shouldn't put, you know, in things that he might not be able to do, and that apple, maybe working on for the next couple of years. But at the last board meeting, when he tenders his resignation as CEO, they have a lunch afterwards, all the engineers bring out the various things that they're working on, and one of them, which I knew would come out pretty soon, so I'll put in the book, is this voice recognition thing. And I do have Steve, and they are panic, because they know Steve is not feeling very well, but he's been brought into this meeting that he's going to try to make it look bad. So he asks, you know, what is now called Siri, you know, if you, do I need an umbrella? And tomorrow says, you know, the prediction is for sunny day, tomorrow in Palo Alto. So it really is doing the beautifully. So finally, Steve says, are you a man, or are you a woman? And they all kind of hold their breath, because, you know, he's trying to trick the machine. And Siri is very good, the two layers of it, and it says, they have not yet assigned me a gender. And they all breathe a sigh of relief, and Steve thinks it's great. So he loved that technology. By the way, Bill Gates was always, I mean, everybody's been trying to crack voice recognition. Yeah. What do you think of the apple that he leaves behind? You've talked about the team, and the great group that he's built. There's certainly, there's rumor to be this product roadmap that goes on and on. But the history of technology companies, with a founder like this, and someone driving it with a vision like this, leaving is not great overall. What do you think about where Apple goes from here without Steve Jobs? Well, the last meeting I told you about when he goes to the board, and does that lunch? Somebody at the lunch makes fun of HP, because that day or that we could gotten out of the tablet business, was either getting in or out of the PC, was totally confused. And Steve said, wait a minute. He stops the person who's making fun of the troubles at Hewlett Packard. So when I was 13, Bill Hewlett gave me my first job. And he and Packard created a company that was imbued with their DNA that was designed not only to make a calculator and then make a computer and make other things, but to continue and last and continue to make new products and come up with new ideas, even after they were gone. And the Bozos screwed it up for Hewlett and Packard. I don't want that to happen at Apple. And he tried deeply to fight off the Bozoxplosion, so there was only a great team of A players, but also to say there's a simple, simple thing that Apple stands for, which is the intersection of great creativity in the humanities with great engineering and technology. And that's what Disney did. You know, that's what a lot of people have done. There are companies that last. IBM is almost 101 years old. I think Apple has imbued in its genetic code, this desire to drive great design and artistic creativity with great design, with great engineering and technology. And it will be at that intersection and the people there now are capable of keeping it at that intersection. You know, 10 years from now, 25 years from now, look, Disney ups and down, ups and down, but you still know what Disney stands for and it's doing fine right now after a few rough patches since Walt Disney died. I would have had to wager, and unlike Rick Perry, I am a betting man, not $10,000, but I would wager that a generation from now, even a century from now, Apple will still exist at the intersection of the humanities and the technology. So that's Apple. Now let's one final question about Steve Jobs. So 100 years ago, the great industrialists and philanthropists, Carnegie, Rockefeller, Mellon, built institutions, as well as corporate legacies, and that legacy survives. Steve Jobs, Eddie lived longer, might have done the same thing, but he chose not to do it for whatever reason now. And his legacy is Apple, but it's built on a rather shifting sandbarb technology. So 100 years from now, you've talked about what you think Apple will do. What do you think the legacy of Steve Jobs will be as people look back on him in this era? Well, I did ask him, I mean, the last five or six pages of the book is just him talking outright about what you're legacy. It's putting something back in the flow of history after you built on those who were you. I asked him, what was his greatest creation? I think he may be the iPad or whatever. He said, no, Apple, the company. Because products come and go, but the hard part is making a company that will continue to make good products. So I do think Apple will be his legacy, but also more specifically, the legacy will be somebody who truly transformed industry after industry by pulling together great ideas and driving the technology to support them. I mean, look at the iPad. People made fun of it. I was there when he launched it. There were all sorts of articles, what is it? You know, an iPhone on steroids. Nobody makes a tablet work. The iPad is now, whether I walk into a doctor's office or, you know, anywhere else, it is transforming industry after industry. $2 billion last year, just in the industry of creating apps for it. The textbook industry, you know, Carnegie was great with education philanthropy. In the end, the iPad made change education as much as any of the Carnegie schools. So I think he's got a pretty solid legacy if you look at each of those industries he transformed. So we often ask our authors to do a short reading at the end and you graciously agreed to read the code of the biography. So we have a lot of things to do with the biography. I wonder if you would do that for us now. Yeah, thank you. As I said, I end -- I'll start earlier on. I do end one more thing, his signature phrase. And I do say "Boggrapher is supposed to have the last word, but this is one of Steve Jobs. And even though he didn't impose his legendary control, I suspect I would not be conveying the right feel for him and the way he asserted himself in any situation. If I just shuffled him on history stage without letting him have some of the last words. So I really take a series of interviews I did with him about his legacy and just let him talk without me getting in the way. But then the Coda is about a sunny afternoon in the back garden of his house he wouldn't feeling well. And he reflected on death. And I say he talked about his experiences in India almost four decades earlier, his study of Buddhism, his views on reincarnation and his views on spiritual transcendence. "I'm about 50/50 on believing in God," he said. "For most of my life, I felt there must be more to our existence than meets the eye." He admitted that as he faced death, he might be overestimating the odds out of a desire to believe in the afterlife. "I like to think that something survives after you die. It's strange to think that you accumulate all this experience and maybe a little wisdom and it just goes away. So I really want to believe that something survives that maybe your consciousness indoors. And then he felt silent for a long time. And then he said, "But on the other hand, perhaps it's just like an on-off switch," he said. "Click, you die, you're gone." And then he paused again, long pause, and he smiled slightly, quote, "And maybe that's why I never like to put on-off switches on Apple devices." That's the end. As someone once said this evening with you has been insanely great. Walter Isaacson, thank you. Steve Jobs is the one who was insanely great. [Applause] Thank you for listening to Decoding Tech from the Computer History Museum. To learn more about the Computer History Museum and our upcoming live events, visit our website at computerhistory.org. [Music]