to all of you viewers, let us know what you think about this issue. when you look at the people admitting to cheating on tests, 62% for undergraduates. 68% on written assignments. what do you think you should be done and what is right punishment? let us know on facebook or twitter as we continue to follow this issue. continue to follow issue. thanks to all of you for watching and on that note, here's "piers morgan tonight." he was an american original. a businessman who changed the world. >> an ipod. a phone. an internet communicator. >> who is the real steve jobs? he's a risk taker, a gambler, charismatic, compelling. >> brilliant and abrasive. >> if somebody said something stupid instead of saying i don't agree you he would say that's the stupidest blank blank blank idea i ever heard. >> i will talk to the man jobs picked to tell his story.

it might just change the way you look at his legend. >> your time is limited. don't waste it living someone else's life. >> and top chef from a tiny italian joint downtown to a global food empire and tv career. mario batali will dish on his past and competition and own waistline. this is "piers morgan tonight." walter isaacson author of the biography steve jobs. walter, welcome. >> good to be here. >> a real firestorm. top of the charts. it's selling like hot cakes. it's causing huge debate. you would expect all that because steve jobs is one of the great american business icons in history. it's a fascinating book. when i plucked out some of the adjectives you use to describe him, obnoxious, rude, ruthless, i'm not surprised. nothing i know about steve jobs surprises me that he would be all of those things.

i would add and i'm sure you would, brilliant, genius. >> absolutely. >> can you be a genius without being all these things? >> i used to work for ted turner and every one of those adjectives applied to him. but he was able to create something totally new. with steve, every person i talked to and those who loved him the most and worked with him closest, they would tell you the steve story. about the time he bit their head off. i would try really hard in the book to make sure everybody understands that that was -- if you are wearing velvet gloves, it's hard to make a dent in the universe. he got people to do things they never thought they could do by inspiring them and sometimes berating them but i think people understood it of him. >> he came to you a number of years ago. some thought at the time very arrogantly. you've done einstein, kissinger.

i want you to do my book. you didn't know he was sick with cancer although he did. it would have been presumptuous maybe. you're not even in your 40s. what was your reaction when he first came to you? >> precisely that. i said, hey, you're my age. in 20 years or 30 years or so i would love to do a biography. he was in an up and down career. it wasn't really until 2009 that i figured out and his wife told me, okay, you ought to do it now. that's when he had just had his liver transplant. of course being steve the minute i said, yes, i would love to do it, i think he had trepidations and second thoughts so we spent a lot of 2009 going back and forth. >> a fascinating time to sit down with a man who probably knew he was dying. this man who has got very bad pancreatic cancer trying a few things. interesting in the book when you say he tried too many alternative treatments and probably could have saved himself if he hadn't done that.

but typical of the man i would guess. >> i'm not sure he would have saved himself. very typical of the man. there's two sides of steve jobs. this rebel counterculture child of the hippy period and he's always trying alternative new things but also the scientific technological geek. so he's doing the most advanced forms of medicine. he's studying both of these as he decides how to treat himself. i think that he never really thought, i don't think, that cancer would catch him up until almost the end he thought he would stay as he put it one lilly pad ahead of the cancer. he was doing targeted therapy. it was based on gene sequencing. every time the cancer would mutate he would find a new way to stop it. even though he was facing his mortality and even before he had cancer he used to talk about life being an arc. you are born and you die.

i think that magical optimistic thinking he had up until the end he thought he would beat the cancer. >> you had a remarkable amount of time with him. over 40 interviews you did with steve jobs which is more time than anybody has had i would imagine with that brain outside of his immediate family, closest friends. the obvious questions to me when i finished the book is did you like him? >> i did. >> was he likable? >> he was compelling and likable because when you first meet him, you're afraid. you heard all of the tales. i saw it every now and then. i would walk around with him whether in a restaurant or a hotel or in a group of people and he would if somebody said something stupid instead of saying i'm not sure i agree with you, he would say that's the stupidest blank, blank, blank idea i ever heard. you would be a little taken aback. >> you saw him do that. this is where i have a problem with the way that he was. i always thought you can judge people in two caps.

those who are polite to waitresses and those who are rude to waitresses. i think you tell a story of how you've seen him be rude to waitresses. a man of his power and wealth to be rude to a waitress serving a table to me hard to like that kind of person. admire and salute him and all of the rest of it but likable? >> well, you know, there are certain types of behavior you don't like. after a while you talk to him and he said that woman didn't want to be doing that job in that way or whatever and he just rationalizes it. i think that if you want to judge everybody by their politeness, you would find a whole bunch of nice clubbable friends but you wouldn't find a lot of geniuses in the mix. >> was he driven by perfectionism? is that what it was all about? >> i think he had an artistic sensibility. just like a picasso or a bob

dylan or whatever it may be. driven by the power of perfection and almost poetic sensibility. as i said a moment ago, there's that sort of emotional sentimental romantic side of him and there's a hardcore business side of him and i think he was driven by connecting the two. whatever he did, even when it came to being tough on the people around him, that instilled such a loyalty and passion that, you know, it was a bonding thing. he said that's the price of admission for being in the room. i get to say you're full of it, you say i'm full it and we -- we create the best team. >> i get that. i worked for rupert murdoch. when you work for these people, yes, they're all those adjectives that i read out earlier about steve jobs. but they are charismatic because of who they are and often very inspiring because they tend to work harder than anybody else. they are driven. they are creative. they take risks. they are gamblers.

all things that most people would like to be but tend not to be. >> you just described steve jobs perfectly. a risk taker. a gambler. charismatic. compelling. >> control freak. didn't he even choose his own cover? >> the one time i really got chewed out is because he said i'll have no control over this book. i'm not going to read it. i don't want it to feel like an in-house book. you can put things in there i won't like but that's good because it's not going to feel like commissioned in-house book but then there was a cover design that the publisher put out in the catalog. he looked at it the and said in short, snippy words, it was the worst thing he had ever seen and he had merit to it. after yelling at me for a while holding the phone like this, he says i won't keep cooperating unless you allow me to have input into the cover. i thought for maybe one second or maybe 1.5 seconds, sure.

a guy with a great design eye. i saw that sort of artistic passion. >> he's a very clean apple style cover. you were designing a book cover for the boss of apple, it would be that. >> i will not show you the one we designed before then. it just shows how bad we were in that design. >> he was right? >> yeah. >> i like that cover. it instantly grabs. >> it's like an apple product. >> simple and clean and fascinating. >> you know johnny, the wonderful guy from britain and he says the drive toward simplicity means you have to understand the depths of something. you can't remove a lot of buttons and then it becomes simple. that was the essence of the steve jobs design sensibility. >> in reading the book, it doesn't sound like he was the world's best engineer. it sounds to me -- i felt this

strongly when he died and he was this great engineer, actually, his genius partly was marketing. this is one of the great marketeers i have ever seen. you knew that he left things off that everyone would want but wouldn't desperately need immediately but know the moment he put them on the next version of that model they would rush out and buy that too. that's brilliant marketing. it's manipulative and cynical. >> you had waz on the show a couple nights ago. steve said, he's 50 times better than any engineer that steve has ever met, steve jobs ever met. he said he could do meetings in his head. they are young kids. steve is -- wozniak has created a blue box that allows you to

rip off the phone company by making long distance calls. steve jobs said i can put a case around it and market it. when waz comes up with the circuit board, it's a brilliant design using the microprocessors and juicing them up to do great things. it's jobs who says we're getting a case for it. get a power supply. >> it's not a brilliant design, a brilliant piece of engineering. it's like all of these greats things where either you have one or the other, they would never be as great as the sum of both parts. >> there's a part in the book i love and a moment i had with steve in his living room where they are listening to the bootleg tapes he had of strawberry fields being created. john lennon is doing it and mccartney is working on it with him. i don't know if you've ever heard it. there are 15 different takes they do. they would hit a wrong cord and they would rewind and steve

would say that's exactly like i love doing at apple and with waz and with the people who are always fighting which we almost have it done and we rewind and make it more perfect. i think waz and steve were that way. lennon and mccartney were that way. >> fascinating. we're go on a break. we'll come back and talk about what i think drives steve jobs throughout his life and that's his extraordinary upbringing. abandoned as a young man and then what happens next in the search for his real parents. a gripping part of his life i think. the employee of the month is... spark card from capital one. spark cash gives me the most rewards of any small business credit card. it's hard for my crew to keep up with 2% cash back on every purchase, every day. 2% cash back. that's setting the bar pretty high. thanks to spark, owning my own business has never been more rewarding. [ male announcer ] introducing spark

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will be giving away passafree copies of the alcoholism & addiction cure. to get yours, go to ssagesmalibubook.com. >> today for the first time ever i would like to let macintosh speak for itself. >> hello. i'm macintosh. it sure is great to get out of that bag. >> steve jobs in 1984 unveiling the first macintosh computer. he looked so dashing there. that was part of his appeal. i remember that launch and feeling so excited because there was a showman. this man was not your conventional geek.

>> he choreographed everything about that everything from the lighting to the poor macintosh team that staggered across the finish line just a couple weeks earlier to get the coding done and now we have to do the launch to make macintosh speak. i think that one of the things he sort of invented among the 20,000 others was that notion of the product launch where the clouds part, the light shines down and the crowd sings "hallelujah." >> it was like michael jackson doing a show only for computers. making it an event and making it exciting and building hype and marketing it and promoting it. all these things he was brilliant at. what i want to get to with him is how much of this was driven by the fact that he was abandoned at birth. he was given away by his real parents. just reading the book it becomes a kind of surging crusade for him to try to find his real parents. tell me about that. >> i remember walking in his old

neighborhood showing me the house is when he was 6 or 7 years old. i went across the street and sat on this lawn and lisa who lived across the street said to me you have been adopted. that means your real parents didn't want you. you were abandoned. he said i ran back into my house and i saw my parents and i was crying. the salt of the earth couple that adopted him. he asked about that. they said no, we specifically picked you out. you were chosen. i think he says to me that part of growing up wasn't just feeling a little bit of a hole like do i fit here because i wasn't born into this but feeling chosen and special. i think there was always a little bit of a hole in him. he would tell his college friends. he would tell his friends in the early days of apple i feel something is missing in me. i think that's why he finally does go on a quest to find his birth mother.

>> he tries to find his mother and is successful. tell me about that. >> he finally gives up after he hired a detective and couldn't find the mother. he sees on his birth certificate the name of a doctor in san francisco. he calls the doctor that sheltered unwed mothers including steve jobs' 25, 30 years earlier and the doctor says all my records were destroyed. i can't tell you who your mother was but that's not true. the doctor was lying and that night the doctor wrote a letter and said to be delivered to steve jobs upon my death. and then the doctor died pretty soon thereafter. it was coincidental. the letter comes to steve and says here's your mother. he tracks her down in los angeles. she says you have a sister in new york. it's one of these tales that nobody could have written. >> what is even more extraordinary, i think, is when he begins the search for his father and in the end he never actually has anything to do with

his father but it turns out by a freakish coincidence that he's met his real father. >> you couldn't make this up. >> the father was like, whoa, i met steve jobs without knowing steve jobs is his son. tell me about that. >> his sister, mona simpson, he meets is an artist like him. a great novelist and loves that she's an artist. she says we have to go on the quest to find the lost father. he's not all that interested but she's able to track down the father who had been born in syria, a graduate student at the university of wisconsin and in one of the weird coincidences of the world moved to california and so there he is running a coffee shop in sacramento. mona goes to see him and steve says don't tell him anything about me. i don't want to have anything to do with this guy who abandoned you and your mother. he says i wish you could have seen me earlier when i ran one of the great restaurants. a big restaurant near cupertino.

everyone used to come there. even steve jobs. mona simpson is taken aback. she doesn't say anything. she doesn't say, steve jobs is your son. and he looks at how shocked she is. he said, yeah, he used to come, he was a big tipper. mona goes back and tells steve and steve says that balding syrian guy, that was my father? forget it. i don't ever want to see him. >> amazing story. >> you couldn't make it up. >> did they have any type of contact at all even at the point when steve was publicly dying? >> no. i think that -- i heard that he said that he sent text messages but no. there was no contact. >> what do you think that did to steve jobs? he obviously had this huge curiosity about his real parents but did he feel great anger do you think towards his father in particular? >> i don't think he felt anger toward his father. he didn't want anything to do with the guy who abandoned the family and mona. i think he was very deeply

connected to his -- what he called his real parents. parents who adopted him. he didn't want to hurt them. paul jobs is a guy who was an auto mechanic and had taught steve all of the lessons of design and how to be a good craftsman and realized that steve was special and treated him as special even when he was a kid when steve didn't want to keep going to the same school, they scraped all their money together to buy a home in a better school district. they just went out of their way to make him feel chosen and special. >> i don't think surprisingly necessarily but certainly it was ironic that steve himself has a girlfriend. he makes her pregnant and then he abandons the daughter. >> 23 years old. same age as his father. >> does exactly what his father did. >> i asked him about it. he said, when it hit me, what a coincidence. steve of course takes responsibility for his daughter after a while. >> ten years. >> after the paternity test he then pays for her schooling and

upbringing and in the first ten years he's not that close to her but she's a spunky good kid. smart kid. good writer. and by the time she's 8 or 9 or 10 years old they form more of a bond. she moves into his house for the high school years. so like any narrative tale, especially one that you couldn't make up, there's an arc to it and the people steve had trouble with eventually they all bond with him and certainly in her life she and all four of his children were very bonded to him. >> we'll come back and talk about the genius of apple as an institution in america. the part that he played really in making us all think differently. [ male announcer ] every day, thousands of people are choosing advil®. here's one story. [ regis ] we love to play tennis.

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i'm going to show you the back first because i'm in love with it. stainless steel. it's really, really durable. it's beautiful. and this is what the front of it looks like. boom. that's ipod. i have one in my pocket as a matter of fact. there it is right there. >> steve jobs introduction of the ipod ten years ago. another amazing moment in

apple's history. apple became the second biggest company in the entire world. it became a company that was global in both its brand in terms of power and influence and he really did teach the world to think differently, didn't he? >> the amazing thing about the ipod is here's a personal computer company. it had finally clawed its way back with beautiful design of the imac and macbook pro and he discovers now we have to think different again. we're going to do devices that will make your computer sort of the hub of your digital lifestyle but it will be for music and then phone and everything else. so he takes apple during the ten years beginning in 2000 in this whole new direction. reinvents the music industry. reinvents the telephone industry and publishing and digital publishing with the tablet. >> ipad latest and last of his creations.

what's so satisfying for him and i would imagine as a biographer the story of steve jobs is building apple up and being cut off at the head and thrown out and discarded unwanted and goes off and has this amazing success in hollywood and then comes back and he takes over the company when it's dying on his knees and then he turns it into the biggest company of its type ever seen. >> it's one of those dramatic tales cast out and returned from the wilderness and when he comes back, he says we now have to focus. they were making 9600s and 9400s. here's a diagram. we'll make four machines. a consumer and a professional laptop desk top. that's it. and then once he got that focus done they would take the management retreats and take his top 100 people to an offsite retreat and then they would fight over what are we going to

do next and after all weekend they would have hundreds of suggestions and have ten on the board and cross off the bottom three and big change is when he decides we'll go into consumer devices and does the ipod. >> how important was his wife in his life? >> you know, everything about steve is the connection of sort of the romantic sort of poetic side of steve and realistic, smart sensible side. >> i'm going to read you a line from the book. we didn't know each other 20 years ago. we were guided by our intuition. he swept me off my feet. it was snowing when we got married. years past, kids came, good times, hard times but never bad times. it's a great line.

very romantic, poetic like you say. >> we were sitting in his living room before his 20th anniversary and he wanted to take her back to yellowstone park and pulled out his iphone and read that to me. i'm going to put pictures from our wedding day 20 years ago and read that. he's reading that and he's crying. he's a deeply emotional intensely emotional person. when people talk about wasn't he hard to live with as a family guy? wasn't he hard to work with as a business guy? yes. how many people have marriages like that that are incredibly tight, faithful in which they really sort of fit together both the sensible side and poetic side. >> it shouldn't be some he's all fantastic. this should be what he's really like. she knew when she said that what he's really like. she knows he's difficult.

>> i do think that he said he wanted something that didn't feel in house and a lot of her friends would always say -- she would say, okay, tell him about steve because i want all sides. of course now that he's gone, you know, it's hard and -- >> have you had a reaction? >> no. >> nothing at all? are you surprised? >> i just don't really want to talk about what their different thoughts might be. >> i don't want to push you but i imagine it's because they have not been massively -- probably not massively enjoying the negative headlines even though i as someone who didn't know him don't see them necessarily negatives. >> they knew him well. it's a very emotional time for everybody. >> let's take another break and come back and talk about what turned out to be the fight of his life that he eventually lost against cancer and what you think as his biographer, the man

who spent so much time and what you think he would like his legacy to be.

your time is limited so don't waste it living someone else's life. don't be trapped by dogma living with other people's thinking and

don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice and have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. >> giving the commencement address at stanford university in 2005. we've seen that many, many times since he died. it's a statement he lived up to himself. great thing you put at the start of the book, the people crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones that do from apple's own think different commercial in 1997. that's what he was in many ways, he was the great maverick. when it came to his illness, do you think he ever really appreciated he was going to die or did he exude infallibility to you? >> i think he understood mortality even before he got cancer. there are many people that remember him as a young man saying we're going to die. the arc of our life is this way. he told people he thought he would die young.

he said it was liberating. it allows am he to follow my intuition. and my passion. i the believe that once he got the cancer, he was so focused on the great treatments he was getting based on targeted therapies, that he thought he could be the first person to outrun the cancer like that by staying one step ahead of it. >> play a quote from the great designer, great british creator and designer of so many of the apple products. we'll discuss it after this. >> bold, crazy, magnificent ideas or quiet simple ones which in their subtlety, detail, they were utterly profound. >> i mean so right. very moving. such an extraordinary relationship together. >> there was a wonderful tale when johnny was doing the first imac.

it's a desk top machine. johnny wants to put a handle recessed into the top. you never really use a handle. you don't move a desk top around. he intuitively felt that his mother was afraid of computers and people are intimidated by them. and the handle gives you permission to touch. and he said he presented it to engineers and it will cost too much and pointless. the minute he says it to steve jobs, boom, steve gets it. johnny said steve would act as if johnny's ideas were steve but johnny immediately after said if it hadn't been for steve those ideas would have died in the studio floor. >> that's true but it's also true from the regular occurrences where he seems very reluctant and in some cases i

would say inhuman in some cases in giving people credit and in giving valued employees the stock perhaps they should have. it's a running theme. what drives that aspect of steve jobs' character do you think? >> i do think by the time he creates what is now apple and it's top team, he totally appreciated each and every person on that team whether talking to me about tim cook or any of them, he really had a deep love for what they did. i think early on he just had this way of thinking which is you give them an idea and he says that's stupid. this is what people would say on the original mac team and a week later he would say let's do that idea. that's his way of processing it. in the end the ideas got done and even with the early macintosh each and every member of that team signed the inside of the case. he said, you are the artist. real artists sign their work.

>> how do you think he would most like to be remembered? how would he like to be remembered? >> beside the obvious that he had four great kids and loved his family. the thing he was most proud of is creating a company where creativity can flourish. he grew up in silicon valley. as his buddhist training taught him, when you again on the creations of people before you and you want to put something back in the stream of history. he said a lot of companies they disappear after a couple of generations. only by building a lasting company can you build lasting innovation connected to technology. >> preposterous as it seemed at the time for him to come to you and say i want the man who did the biography of einstein to write about me, does it seem to preposterous today? >> i would put him in a line with ford and ben franklin.

if you want to figure out what genius is, you can start with einstein but somewhere in one of those orbits you have to have steve jobs. >> it's a brilliant book. thank you for coming and talking about it. >> great to see you. >> coming up, celebrity chef mario batali on his empire, shrinking waistline and serving salads to those one percenters. fore! no matter what small business you are in, managing expenses seems to... get in the way. not anymore.

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italian food to the masses. >> welcome, sir. >> thank you very much for having me. >> are you italian? >> i'm an italian-american. i was born in seattle, washington. >> do you feel italian? >> i do in that after studying college and figuring out the restaurant business from the american perspective, i moved to a tiny hill down near florence and lived there for 3 1/2 years and learned to speak the language. [ speaking italian ] >> america's going through a rough time at the moment, very obviously. your restaurants appeal very much to what michael moore would call the 1%. how are you seeing the economy impact on those people, just

from what your business tells you? >> we're -- i have 19 restaurants. nine of which are around new york city. we have everything from a pizzeria with a $30 check average to four-star italian restaurant with $160 check average. we run book ends on that business. what i must point out, however, and just traveling around the country a little bit and from knowing a lot of my friends in the business, it seems that new york city and los angeles are a little bit kind of insulated from the full fallout even if there is definitely 99% and 1% or say real number is more like 90 and 10. we're lucky enough to be in a place because there's tourism and because there's people not just relying on their own jobs, they're here in new york to try food and theater. i think the theaters are still doing pretty well as well. where there are tourists and locals getting together, it makes sense. it works for us. >> you are a fiery individual. you like to be passionate and lose your temper and you're a good businessman. you get things done. you employ people. you're successful.

if you were running the country, what would you do to fix this malaise? >> i'm not sure. i must say the base of the problem right now is that truly never more than any other time before are we truly 50-50. it's two sides. and both quite adamant and unfortunately or fortunately depending on how you look at it, republicans and that guard prepare themselves in a way to present it more like a really successful advertising campaign and they are also in every knife fight with a knife. obama came in with a really great idea. i love him. i love what he represents. he came into the knife fight without the knife and thought he might just bowl them over and politics need someone to get in there and fight every inch. every time. you can't take a break. >> especially in new york. new york is full of pujilist. it's war every dan on these streets. in a positive way.

you're competitive with each other. restaurant business is thriving but incredibly competitive. you must wake up and want to kill your rivals in a business sense. i don't get that feeling about obama. he seems too nice a guy sometimes. >> the beauty of new york city is even if 3 million people hate you, there's 5 million left. you don't have to create a focus group successful restaurant. you can have a point of view. big enough and wide enough that people appreciate it, some people came into our restaurant and say we rather you play opera. i'm like get your own damn restaurant. we play rock 'n' roll because that befits the experience and it's a unique opportunity for people to say i love music, food, lighting and love the whole experience and i'll come back. >> you have the world's most long suffering wife. i'll show you why. look at this clip. >> i never understood this shriek response. >> i would shriek if i saw you walking down the street and i didn't know you. >> you would not. >> there you are like some sort of latter day james bond. sports car. shades.

gwyneth paltrow. >> let's not pretend she's my wife though. we had dinner last week. we get along fabulously. all three of us were together with the kids. we had a blast. chris wasn't there. he was busy working on his new album. >> do you pinch yourself sometimes when you watch a clip like that? do you think how did this ever happen? there you are, in the flash car with gweyneth paltrow. >> life smiles upon those who smile upon life. there is a component of luck, but you also have to be able to capitalize when luck shines away on you. i've worked hard and we near a good position. >> to all the people suffering out there, the ones who lost their jobs, their homes, whatever, what message do you give them? someone who has come from nothing to achieve what you have achieved, what do you tell these people? >> i say the best way to do it is at least 20% of the time try

to find a way to do something for somebody else who hasn't asked you to do it. also, keep in the game and don't be daunted by what seems to be a really long-term setback when in fact if you're careful, it might be a short term setback. we are in tough economic times. people may need to evaluate what sit they're going to do for 20 years. maybe being in the banking industry may not work. but as i can see from just looking at it, the auto industry has come back from the brink of disaster and has wrangled production back into american hands. we're good at doing stuff. it's when we launch ourselves into the service industry that we would slowly fade away. we need to produce and make things here. >> when we come back, i want to talk to you about your book "simple family meals," because i can only cook one thing.

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i decided that as my last meal, it needs to be a voyage of 300 or 400 days on boat, going from magnificent port to magnificent port, to eating delicious fish courses made by the very best local chefs, each

with a glass of the local wine this could take years. >> i want to come with you that is your new abc show "the chew" that's the way i want to die, two or three-year gastronomic orgy, a big fat guy explodes in a restaurant. >> one thin wafer. >> boom, what a way to go. what has been the best meal you've ever had, the one if i said, mario, you've got four hours to live, you can have one meal again? >> we would, i would say that i had a remarkable meal at the sushi stand at the market in tokyo. it was served at 4:45 or 5:00 in the morning. the only thing missing was my family. i would have to have my family right there and we would be in great shape but that remarkable kind of procession, remarkable flavors that so spoke of everything that i had just seen

and how remarkably they put it together in the simplest way and how much it paid off on the tongue. >> cooking at its essence should be simple, shouldn't it? you can go for the fancy gastronomy that is a very fine art form of eating. but if you ask me, who could go to any restaurant in new york today, but would actually much prefer to have simple food presented simply, this book's perfect. "simple family meals" here. what's concept of this? >> there's two kind of concepts going at the same time. the most important one is that people sit down at the table as often as they can. and in this hectic time with text messages and voicemails and e-mails and a thousand ways not to pay attention to the people, even the ones hurt in same room as, the idea that americans are moving away from each other at quantum rates is because they don't really spend any time where they remove all of that electronic and just have a conversation. when you talk about what builds

confidence in your children, when you have regular meals with them, you can share both your success and lack of success on certain things in a way that allows you to know that you're empowered to move forward, even in lack of success. and the meal is the most logical and normal time to get people together. so, this book kind of breaks the seasons as opposed to four into 12. it is -- every month has a different kind of mantra. each one has a main course, three pastas, five vegetable dishes and a dessert and a soup. and if you think about it you don't have to make all those at once, but sometimes the way to lure people in your family back to the table is by creating something that they really relish or really love. so create a family dish and kind of -- instead of going seven nights, which i like, maybe just sunday or monday, whatever day. choose a day you open up the table, everyone gets something they like and they spend time, perhaps even more significant than that is when the dishes are dirty and you finished, instead

of rushing are forward to get on to the next thing, make sure everyone sit there is for 15 minutes and just languishes over each other's company without necessarily having anything to do. >> i don't want to offend you, but you are half the man you used to be, mario. what's happening to you? >> 20%. >> you're disappearing. how much weight have you lost? >> about 50 pounds from the time that we worked on the spain series which i believe was at my biggest. >> was it too much paella? >> too much of everything. >> did you have a moment where you woke up and said, enough? >> i saw the first screening of the show and said, i can't believe how big i am. i am on the path. my trick has been to eat the same things, just cut the portions in half. >> i don't think you should lose much more, mar yo. >> i would love to lose another 30. >> i'm always terrified when i see a skinny chef. >> i still wouldn't be skinny. don't worry.