but not equal. it's been a are you talking about racial separation or separation of power in the constitution -- >> [inaudible] spearman i'm sorry. are you talking about the separate but equal? >> the separation but not equal. >> we can go back to the case we did right on justice rutledge as a law student at the university of oklahoma. he wrote without question that this idea into law school for one person was ridiculous and particularly in law school there shouldn't be any racial separation at all. they should be able to go to law school in effect. stevan from the beginning he was strong on that as was rutledge for that matter. ..

>> what does justice know about any proper processing complaints, not hearing the case, or have a hearing or argument? >> are you talking about when a justice has a personal interest

in the case? >> our responsibility of failing of duty is considered in some case dismissed as it does not persist through. >> well, there's a new thing, new question of steven's own recusals. >> the ones that are best known, the ones involving the chemical known as agent orange used in vietnam by the u.s. military, it said he rescues himself from cases involving that because of his son, however, there's no rule of law in the supreme court that a justice has to say he's rescuing. the interesting thing, justice caygan will have to rescue

herself for some, but the justices take that very seriously. there's a case where there's the use of the phrase "under god" in the pledge of allegiance because he spoke publicly not just about the issue, but about the case itself. it was the case out of california, and the justices met saying you can't sit, and he didn't. they -- >> i'm surprised he wouldn't explain why he rescued himself, but i think it was obvious. the death of his son from vietnam >> that fits with the themes in the book, and i want to thank both of you for a fascinating book.

again, "an independent life," and i want to thank the audience for coming and those on booktv for tuning in, and i think the authors will be here to sign books if you want to come forward, and thanks for coming to the center of american progress. >> thank you. [applause] [inaudible conversations]

>> up next, walter isakson recounts the life of steve jobs. mr. issacson speaks at mountain view, california for about an hour and a half. >> good evening, everyone, and welcome to the computer history museum. i'm john holler, the ceo, and my pleasure to welcome you tonight on the behalf of the trustees, staff, our members, everybody associated with the museum, just delighted you are here. toipt thank our good -- i want to thank our good friends at intel who sponsored the entire season one and they provided support for the speaker series, and in connection with with revolutionaries, i'm delighted to announce a fairly significant partnership with kqad. kqad and the museum partnered to produce a 1 3

part series and it's the best of the series featuring people you will have seen and heard either permly here at the -- personally here at the museum or on c-span. by the way, kqad and c-span are both here tonight. this is the lineup that starts january 16th and will go for 13 weeks. of course, walter issacson, and ibm chairman, jeremy, ibm's david, inventer of watson. paul allen, jane, the expert in gaming around the world with npr's laura sidel. james miley, david heartily of the british computing society

and protege of mark wilks. author of black hawk down, talking about his other book, first digital world war, digital legend and david irishman, and two of the leading ai experts in the world. this is quite a lineup. we feel very, very privileged to have had every one of these people on our stage in 12 # months and looking forward to kicking often season two in january. watch your e-mail and museum news letter because we'll be talking about the lecture series to come. now on 20 the program. january 15th, 2008, steve jobs was on stage in san fransisco making one of his legendary presentations. the kindle e-reader comes up,

and jobs said this will go nowhere being uncharacteristically blunt. [laughter] he said it would go nowhere because americans stopped reading. it doesn't matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is people don't read anymore. 40% of the people in the united states read one book or less last year. the concept is flawed. well, it's true people only read one book this year, we know which book it is. [laughter] [applause] despite the late arrival on october 28, after steve's death, it went immediately to number one on amazon, and ever since then, dominated every best seller list in many parts of the world. walter's been at this for awhile, not only a distinguished journalist, former chairman of

cnn, former managerring editor, and now the president and ceo of the aspen institute, but next year marks the 20th anniversary of his first major biography, and to that he's added the others. we talked about opening this evening with something special featuring items from the landmark collection you can see here on stage. walter will introduce them. don't they look good? they have sneakers on here. we had about 3,000 items in the collection from apple. it's one of the largest collections of its kind in the world dealing with app 8, but after steve died when we looked through the collection to see what was the best of the best, we discovered something very amazing. a videotape regis mckenna made in 1980 of a 25-year-old steve

jobs making a presentation at stanford on the roots of apple and his vision for the company. we digitized that and it's at computerhistory.org. it's never been seen before, and we'll play you two minutes of it tonight, and i hope you will be as amazed as we were when you see it. >> we had these things when we started out. we couldn't buy a computer on the market, so we liberating parts from atari, and worked on the design for six months deciding we would build our own computers, so we built them, and was up until 4 in the morning for many moons, and we got it working, and immediately everybody wanted one. it took 40 hours to build one of these things, and we had a lot

of friends that worked at similar companies to liberate the parts. [laughter] we found ourself spending every moment of our time building computers, and it was a tremendous drain on our livings. we got the idea to make a printed circuit board without the parts and cut the assembly and keep the time down to five or ten hours. i sold my calculator, my van, and pull together $1300, did a layout, and we hoped to reap parts and transportation, so that's what we did. i was out trying to peddle pc boards, and i walked into the first bike shop in mountain view, and he said he would like to take 50 of these computers,

and i saw dollar signs in front of my eyes. [laughter] he had a catch is he wanted them fully tested and ready to go. a new twist. we spent the first five days with part distributers to give us $10,000 worth of parts out of thin air, based on enthuse yam. got the parts, sold them, and that's how we got started. [applause] >> ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming walter issacson. [applause] >> hey. >> good to see you. [applause] >> how great it is to be here at the computer history museum. wonderful, wonderful pleasure. can i give a shoutout to steve who i just saw and his wife, joist. stand up.

[applause] andy next to them, i think, and all the history is here. totally intimidating me because i'll keep looking over, and they are nodding or shaking their head. no, no, no, it was not that way exactly, but if i look over there, they are the cues. >> it's a silicone valley crowd, walter, they won't be that polite. >> oh, dear. [laughter] >> so happy to you here. >> thank you, appreciate it. >> let me ask you about your very, very first meeting with steve jobs in 1984, junior editor of the times, he comes to new york to demonstrate the macintosh. how'd that go? >> you see both sides of steve, the absolutely passionate side because there he is with the original mac, that thing sitting there, looks like it's smiling up at you. he shows us how thin the strip

is, shows us the graphic icons, and you can tell his passionate about every pixel and furious at "time" saying we're not good as "news week," and somebody, won't name the name, wrote a horrible story about him, and that's when i first started to realize that sort of impatient impeach lism you saw in him was connected to the passion and perfectionism. >> you meet incredible people in your career. something special about that encounter? a particular impression? >> i must admit, i was meze moriized by him. you saw it there. that's what he was. he's telling these stories. he was mad not being madman of the year by the end of 1982. i was an idiot on the wrong side of that voting for paul volker,

and we had done a machine of the year then, and so you could tell the first time you met steve jobs that there was something compelling about him. >> flash forward 20 year, it's 2004, and he gets in touch with you. >> yeah, gives me a call, and i just joined the aspen institute, talked for awhile, do you want to speak at aspen? no, but i want to take a walk with you. he says why don't you do a biography of me he sort of suggested. i did ben franklin, was finishing einstein, i thought, okay, franklin, einstein, steve, okay. i said you're a really, really great subject, but let's wait 30 years until you retire, and it was not until 2009 when he had his liver transplant, went on the medical leave that it sunk

in that he was fighting cancer, that he transformed with his team a wide variety of industries. you know, first home and personal computes, but by that point, by 2009, had transformed the music industry with itunes and the ipod, the phone industry, the publishing industry, tabloid computing, and that's when i said, all right, you know, 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 if any call when we started talking about it, he told me something that was said to him which is that you always want to stand at the intersection of liberal arts and the sciences. you know, right there between the humanities and technology or engineering, and that's something we lost in the cp snow

era where you were in humanities or the sciences, and my theory among others was that connecting creativity to wonderful feats of engineers is what made him so magical. >> you wrote something in the book, a quote, "his passion for perfection led him to indulge his instinct to control." i want to talk about the editorial control question because you must have had to graze that and set l it early on. how did you manage to do that? >> i was stunned because it never really came up. >> huh. >> and then after awhile, he kept saying, well, it's your book, it's your book. i'm not even going to read it. he did say, by the way, people don't read books. >> yeah, yeah, but it's yours. >> by the way, i wanted to be honest. i want you to interview, you know, people who didn't like me as well as people who did.

he said, you know, he was brutally honest his life. he did not want it to feel like an in-house book, but like an independent book, and therefore, he was going to exercise no editorial control. >> did that ever change? >> well, the one time he did, fitting into the theory of people don't read books, but look at them, is that simon and schuster put into a catalog a cover design, a place holder, a cover of steve with an apple and isteve as the title. i landed in the san fransisco airport to go to a product launch he was going to do, maybe the ipad, and i saw the thing you least like to see on the iphone, six or seven missed calls from steve jobs. [laughter] you know all the san fransisco airport. i'm there right in the concourse, had returned, and he just starts yelling at me. he said you have no taste, you know, and, you know, the title

is gimmicky, and it's ugly. i don't want you to come to the demonstration. [laughter] i'm holding the phone, you know, and timely he says i'm not going to continue to cooperate unless you allow me to have input into the cover art. now, it took me somewhere between a second and 5 -- a second and a half to say sure. here's the eye for something like that, and he spent a lot of time, you know, just trying to make it a very simple, clean cover, and so that was the one time i felt his wrath and also the one time when he had editorial input. >> huh. you know, you talk a lot about -- and you quote his friends who coined the term "reality distortion field." >> yeah. >> 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 and distortion andy wrote about it in "revolution of the valley," and the engineers there come from a star trek theories which is 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. waz talked about that to me in his own book about, you know, steve saying you have to do this in four days. i think it was, you know, one of the atari games they were doing, and he said it can't be done. steve said, you can do it. that was the reality distortion field, and four days later, it had been done. 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 were -- i mean, this will be people in the audience, they know more than, you know, 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. >> one final question about the process of writing the book, and then we'll move on. >> whatever you want. >> to the substance of steve. you had the luxury of the kind of long historical detachment from einstein and 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 detachment you enjoy not being

able to spend time with einstein or franklin? >> a couple things. when steve did the stanford speech, he said i have three stories. you become a story teller. you don't try to preach, and i just tried to let the stories tell themselves. one 69 things i -- one of the things i discovered by having so much time with him and so much time with 150 other people who worked with him is how much more we know or i could know about him than i did about benjamin franklin or einstein. you think franklin wrote a lot of letters, 40 volumes of papers, einstein, still compiling those papers, and we should know more, but the flying the kite in the rain, one little journal entry with a newspaper clip, but with steve, everything that happened i'd hear about it at great length, and then you hear other people's versions of it, and i probably ended up

knowing a hundred or 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. >> okay. let's talk about the story telling now, and the place i'd like to begin is his partnership with waz, the very early days. >> the blue box. >> right. >> it starts with atari, actually, doing games with steve is on the night shift because they kind it easier to work with him if he's on the night shift. [laughter] he learns a lot with atari and the notion of sub chips and how they do amazing things and also simplicity. remember that games like pong and broke out and star trek had to be so simple that a stoned freshman could figure them out. [laughter] like the instructions were insert quarter, avoid clingons or something. that simplicity got embedded in him.

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 who replicated the bell system's tones and thus made free phone calls and steve jobs said we got to do this. went to slack, the stanford lin linear accelerated library there, found the manuals, and made a version that didn't quite work. waz goes to berkley, but the first semester there, he makes the first digital version of it, and there you see the partnership, and fortunately, i can't see waz and whether he's shaking his head or not, but they come up with the amazing circuit board and, of course, loves to show it off.

steve says we can package it and sell it and make money. they went door-to-door selling this thing and testing it out by, i think, calling the vatican, and waz pretended to be henry kissinger and said he was at a meeting and had to speak to the pope. i can see him nodding. [laughter] they never got the pope on the phone, and they were smart enough to figure out it was not henry kiss -- and if not for the blue box, it wouldn't have been apple. >> that's pretty profound. why did he feel that way? what could they do together? >> they were very complement ri meaning they complemented each other well. he could say waz could have meetings in his head, and he had

been taught by, you know, his father, being an engineer is the highest calling, so he never thought about it. maybe we should package it, a good power supply and integrate it and sell it at twice or three times the cost of our materials, and so what steve did was as he did his whole life, took really great ideas, had a great vision, and pulled it all together to do something amazing, and i think that was the perfect partnership for somebody who was, you know, could design a circut board with one quarter of the number of chips that any other jeer would take to make it work. >> we talked 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,a-ha moment. it's about the collaboration. when you think of einstein, for

example, was there a relationship? have you found through history and as a journalist these kinds of relationships occur over and over? you find waziak and jobs -- >> no, not always. with einstein, it was a trousseau low act. -- true solo act. especially with general relativity, he's pacing alone in his apartment in berlin, and unlike other physicists of his time, he was not collaborative. steve, even though he was sometimes tough on people, truly created teams like the original macintosh team of which andy was apart, that were bonded together as if they were pirates in a pirate band, and steve was able with his both inspiring way and demanding way to create collaborative teams, and he's done that -- he did that his whole life, and then even now

for the past ate ore nine years at app 8 you've had an intensely loyal collaborative team. >> apple is up and running. >> they start, just to give a shoutout. >> a lot of friends here. >> yeah, the app -- apple won, showing that which you heard on the tape, they go purvey it at the bike shop, and they get up and running when they create that circuit, when they create the circuit board, put it all together, and steve decides to incorporate. in fact, they sold today for $1.6 million. and they 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 at reed college where they dropped out,

and went to the apple farm. he was there tending to the apples, and he had come back from the apple farm and says, okay, we're going to create a company, and he gets excited that not only are they making a product, but we'll have our own company, and they couldn't figure out what today meant. they had matrix and perm -- personal computers, but steve said, what about just apple. apple computer. counterintuitive. makes your head snap a bit, but friendly. a whiff of the counterculture, but it's american as pie. i think it says if we can't think of a better name within the day, we'll register it as apple computer, and, by the way, he said, it gets in front of atari in the phone book. [laughter] >> important marketing angle. [laughter] so they begin to work on the apple i. apple is growing, putting together this team early in the

early history of the post corporation period, but there's another ingredient that has to come along to make it work; right? mark comes on to the scene? >> right. first of all, you need money. they go from the apple i to the apple ii. the differences, jerry, and others, they create -- i mean, you know, create a beautiful case, need the plastic molding, and it's going to cost a lot of money to do it. you just can't sell your vw bus and hp calculator the way they did to get money for the apple i, and so they need investment capital, and mike comes along, signs a line 6 credit, but also gives them a great piece -- or gives steve a great piece of advice which is a marketing document with three con cements 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 make an emotional connection to the people who are going to buy your product, and then the third is also not a great word, the words "impute," but that means cast an ora around whatever you do so that the minute you, you know, steve even throughout his career, had his own personal name on the patents for the boxes, the packaging of the apple product so when you open it up, the ipod cradled, it impiewded it was cool just the way it was, and that's what the apple ii does. >> as primitive as it looks to us today, he obsessed with the curve of the corners of the edges. >> the tempers and design elements. >> you know, he had been fascinated by the sony style and the very -- right when they move

out of the garage, in a little office, and next door is a sony showroom, and he would fondle the brochures, and he went to a design conference and growing up in joseph ikeler home, it was mass marketed, simple frank lloyd wright style homes for the every man, but it was simplicity, and it was that bell house style of make it simple, but the simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, and so clean, white, simple. that's the style for apple. >> it's about this time as apple grows as a company, the apple ii takes off, selling hundreds of thousands of units, the phrase in the book surfaces, "temperamental and bratty". >> yeah.

>> it seems at this point there's almost a breakout, very particular break out at this point where that side of jobs, temperamental and bratty is out, and other people described it, and it starts to grate on people. >> he was temperamental. that's why he was on the night shift at atari. it was not new. temperamental people have the art. you have the passion for a product and make it perfect. that temperamentalness, you know, original present of mike scott, and scotty tried to temper jobs, didn't work, and they bring in john skully, a polite gentleman to handle steve, but with steve, there's the whole package. the temperamentalness was a part of it, and it shows just in how he cared even, you know, i tell

the story in the book with steve walking me by his house that he grew up in, the house that he was very young in, and his dad, build a fence with his dad, he showed me the fence and we touched it, and he said my dad taught me to make the back of the fences as nice as the front, and i asked why, and my dad said, but you will know. that's why even on the apple ii, he wants the circuit board to be beautiful. when they get to the macintosh, the next one over, even though you cannot open it, he holds it up for awhile because the chips on the board are not neatly aligned. when they say nobody can open it and nobody can know, but he said, mac designers, you will know. the other interesting thing in talking about steve 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. waz's view was open, license out the software, but on the apple ii, there were eight slots, jack into it, open it up, get to the circuit board, and steve jobs was against absolutes. he wanted as an artist would. not having bob dylan saying let's have an open sowter on the lyrics. he didn't like people opening it up, and waz insists he wants the apple ii to have the jacks, the slots, but the mac doesn't, and there's no screws you can use to open it up. there was very steve jobs like all the way through his career, really believing and tightly controlling like the guard pes that he -- gardens that he loved to visit, carefully cureed by one artist's

sensibility. >> let's move to the macintosh era. so much going on at app 8 -- apple at that point and so much growth, and the performance -- personal relationship begins with john skully. >> it was a bad mistake. i mean, it was almost like he saw john as a bit as a father figure or a mentor. john really wanted to be cool and hip and wanted steve's approval, and it was, for awhile, you know, the famous line, i think it's at the san remo apartment that steve is thinking of buying, brings john up in new york, looking over central park, and steve says do you want to spend the rest of your life because john was at pepsi or do you want to change the world?

skully comes, and he is a man of prep school sensibilities, great manners, very kind, but he's hard -- it's hard for him to deal with conflict. steve felt the price -- i say why were you tough? the price of admission to being with me is that i got to be able to tell you you're full of it -- he used a word with two more letters and it, and you have to tell me i'm full of it, and we'll duke it out. john was not that way. secondly, skully was basically a marketer, and having run pepsi u.s., he didn't worry about the product. he was not fiddling with the formula for dorritos saying i can make this insanely great. it was shelf space marketing, and i think steve, after awhile, felt that skully just didn't get into how awesome the mac was,

and then it didn't help that it was insaply great, and skully priced it at $2500. 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 ii was the workhorse, 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 macintosh itself, the design itself, and this is a point in the book where you insert the great famous quote from jobs "a good artists copies, great artists steal, and we are

shameless about stealing great ideas. " that quote is associated with the genesis the macintosh. >> they take two visits to xerox park, and as you know, xerox had the concept of the desk top, a design meaning each pixel on the screen could be mapped to bits in the microprocessor, and so you can make a beautiful machine. we are old enough to remember, and if not, go throughout the museum here to remember what you have to do with the green letters, c prompt and c colon backslash, whatever command, it was god awful, and suddenly "time" we get the mac and you can click and the document appears, drag and drop. i do a whole big section on the visits to xerox park and i think the misconception that they just

took the graphical interface from them 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 really make it great. 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 bad machine. what they did what they took the metaphor was, we'll take the mouse and totally simplify it and you can click and drag and drop and double click and open things up. invent menus, and bill invents clipping to have documents lurking on top of other document s and it looks messy. none of that was in the xerox original graphical interface, so i think, first of all, they take the xerox metaphor and make it

insanely great. secondly, ts elliot's line, there falls the shadow between conception and the reality -- well, they were able to execute on it, which xerox kane -- and others were not. it is true that part of steve's genius was looking at a thousand ideas at any given point saying that's great, this one sucks, this we'll ignore, but pulling together ideas and including ideas from xerox park. >> this is one of the times he's pushing the team incredibly hard. >> reality distortion field is then coined. >> at that point. >> at one point, one of the engineers, larry, in charge of the boot up of the machine, and steve says it takes too long. shave ten seconds off. the guy say #-gs you can't. it's an elegant piece of code. steve says if you could save a

human life, would you shave ten seconds off. he says, well, yeah. all right, say there's a million macintoshes and it's ten seconds every time someone boots up, and you can save this number of lives every year if you shaven off 10 seconds. an example of the reality distortion field working. within four weeks, he shaved off 28 seconds. everything about that. you know, you see the screen. it's a rounded rectangle. i think it's bill -- i'll get corrected if i get names wrong, but i think it's bill doing what's called the primitives that you can easily put on the screen. he does a scwear that's easy, and then he does a circle because it's hard, but he figures out the way, and steve

says you need not just a rectangle and circle, but rectangle with rounded edges. the guy says, well, no, that's not possible. why do we need it? steve makes him walk around the parking lot in the neighborhood pointing to things like windshields, billboards, and screens saying rounded rectangles are what people see every day. they are more beautiful to look at. he then came up with the primitive to do a rounded rectangle, and even, you know, those thin pinstripes on the pull down menu. he fretted over them. even the susan care doing the fonts. i mean, you know, steve was there because he had taken that calligraphy course dropping out of reed caring about the spacing on each one of the fonts. >> the perfection that he was

seeking at that point and the almost impossible task because he was asking people to perform engendered in the book as you report it to two completely different camps, it seems to me, for people who worked for jobs at that point. there was people who he'd push, you were better for it -- >> bud was one of the great engineers. >> there's others who say worst experience of my life. if you balance, not only in this case, but in other cases, too, the nemple -- number of people who felt one way, tremendous affection, and the others the other way, would you say there's -- >> there's actually three categories because people felt both. [laughter] >> yeah. >> 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

pushed me to do things i never thought i could do. he drove me nuts at times. it was the greatest experience in my life. >> it premiers, it's a great commercial, the legend commercial. talk about that. >> the 1984 ad is interesting because in steve jobs' soul, you have the heart or soul of a member of the counterculture, a rebel, a misfit. in fact, even different ads start here's to the rebels, the misfits, those who think different. the 1984 ad is, i think, an incredible cultural landmark and icon. obviously because of the novel. we had been taking up until then of computers as being centralizing and controlling and a 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, the stuart brand holder 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, and the problem with that is as i said, he doesn't love slots. he doesn't want it to be open or be able to hack in, so in some ways he's violated the hit by creating an apines you can't -- appliance you can't open up to, but he wants to assert that i'm still part of the hacker ethos fighting the establishment, and that's that amazing ad. ridly scott who did "blade runner" films it in london, and it's the woman being chased by

the thought police, and big brothers on the screen, and she finally says the hammer, and it decimates big brother, and then it says, you know, in, you know, apple introduced macintosh, find out why 1984 won't be like 1984, and so they show it at a board meeting, and all the board members are like this at the end -- [laughter] i think it was phil of mai simplicity's of california -- macy's of california said let's get a new agency. they are so fightenned of it, they buy the time back from the super bowl and not run the ad. steve is furious. he shows the ad, and waz is like let's chip in and pay for the ad. they don't need to because lee and the wonderful people who

made the ad, lee, a beach bum of a brilliant genius, who was the guru of advertising for apple ever since, they can't sell the time back. the ad runs. runs really only once or once nationally, but it becomes by many estimates incoming tv gid and advertising aid, the best advertisement of all time. >> it doesn't sell well -- [applause] >> we don't get the rights to show it. >> it's on youtube. >> it's not supposed to be. we shouldn't go there. wonderful commercial, doesn't sell well, steve's removed from running the macintosh division. that begins the end; right? >> correct. >> the relationship with skully,

and there's a massive blow up in the end. you go in the book day by day. >> seven days in may. >> the fateful day. >> steve twice in that week tries to bring people up to his house in would side, and they all have a sort of plot they know steve probably should not take over the company, and it's one of the great learning experiences, but he feels abandoned, and, you know, he was going through a period of -- he was adopted, abandonment and father figures, and the ad's on the board, author rock, a father figure, john skully, and they all go around the room voting against him and abandon him, and 4e really, you know, takes it hard. >> how does he recover from that? i mean, when he talked to you about that period, pretty dark time, what did he say? >> well, he described vividly

every single day of the week including where, you know, the food came from when he was serving it on the patio trying to bring mike around, and, you know, it is still sered into his mind. >> this is almost 25 years later. >> he goes to europe for awhile, bicycles around with -- he then talks to some people and comes up with the concept of doing next computer, and by the end of 85 has recruited a handful of people from apple causing a lawsuit. i mean, this is really bad at this point because the board and skully and all think, okay, you are stealing our people. he creates next. he says in the stanford speech and me being fired from apple is the best thing that happened to me, liberated me, and helped me change. i think it was the experience at next that liberated him and

matured him more. >> why was that? >> well, at next, there was no board of directors on him, no ceo brought in. he could indulge every instinct so he gets paul rand, the grand designer of logos, $100,000 just to do the next logo before they have anything. he gets, you know, a beautiful headquarters with a patented staircase. you can see them there in apple store, but everything had to be -- he wanted his own factory. he wanted next to be a perfect cube, and those of you in computer manufacturing know there's usually a draft angle, that means it's 91 degrees to pull it out of the mold. if it's exactly 90 degrees, it's harder to get. no, exactly 90 degree, and that meant they had to do special manufacturing. it had to be matte black. everything about it was him

imdull jing the drive for perfection and the factory being in pure white and robotic. it is a glorious machine that's an absolute market failure, and at the very first macintosh offsite, he does a series of mamums on the white board, and the first is don't compromise. that's a great inspiring quote. it's also not really a great way to run a business. as ben franklin said compromisers don't make great heros, but great democracies. you have to learn how to make tradeoffs and don't compromise mentality, he had it for awhile 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 the intersection of art and technology. a friend brought him up to george lucass to meet some of those people, and lucas was getting rid of the digital animation software division he had. steve thought that was really cool, thought he could make it for consumers the ability to do digital renderings, and that never took off, but there was one guy working there in charge of making shorts to show off how cool the machines were, and he made a couple shorts with a lamp and then one called tin toy, and the rest, as they say, is biography, if not history, and makes one eventually leads to toy story, and pixar is a transformative thing in the animation business. >> he said 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 can get cancer from working hard and stress, but he felt that way and felt there was great stress, driving up to pixar, was hand handling, and then, of course, going back to app 8, he's -- apple he's juggling quite a few things. i think that was a time of great stress in his life and also unhappiness. next is not doing very well. those machines are not selling. pixar, you know, you have to remember it's a hardware software company, and nobody's buying pixar imaging machines other than disney, but it's not selling that well. for awhile, he's hemorrhaging money at both companies. >> and also one of the most

wildly created periods too; right? >> absolutely. >> pixar was producing these phenomenal -- >> well, by the time they produced "toy story" they were no longer hemorrhaging money. >> right. did he long for apple during this period? did he ever fully give up on the notion? >> no, apple was his baby. apple was his child. i don't know that he just longed for it, but he was deeply frustrated it was being screwed up that after awhile they were not inventing new product, and the products sucked and there were 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 he created. >> leads to the triumphant return. >> because they can't create an operating system, at a certain

point, he says, okay, i have to buy an operating system, and the bos, and looks at microsoft with the question of adopting windows, and that would have been weird. [laughter] and then there's this amazing operating system that steve jobs had done it next with a kernel next to it, what apple needed, and eventually apple decides they have to buy next to get the operating system. you buy next, you buy next to get steve jobs, and as -- i'm not sure who said it, but gi will,, meet steve jobs and game over. >> yeah, you tell the story, and he tried to resist that, but found himself -- >> game over. >> being drawn in into the

reality distortion field. >> wrea. >> and then begins maybe arguably one of the greatest decades that any corporation ever had. >> totally stung. first of all, he creates, you know, with the new operating system, brings bill gates, had falling outs and love-hate relationships, gates comes back, makes an investment, makes microsoft, word, xl, and others for the new mac os, but also focuses on design. y'all remember, and you probably have it here, but not on stage, the first imac. he goes back to apple in 1997, and they form this bonding, and they create the imac, you know? johnny sketches it out, looks like a rabbit on your desk. steve says that's not good, but they keep playing with the model until they have it beautiful. they make did translucent and go

to jelly bean factories to get it right. it lets you see the circuit board ideas, and he comes up with the notion it's a big machine, and the engineers say you don't need a handle. why do you want a handle? you're not supposed to pick it up. what steve and johnny understood is that computers were still intimidating to people, but the handle gives you permission to touch it saying i'm at your service. just by having the recessed handle, haven't if you didn't use it, you felt the computer was deferential to you so the beautiful design when nay finally have flat screens, and steve says, no, no, no, integrity to the flat screen. you screwed it up. he goes home. johnny goes to steve's house, and in the backyard, there's all

these sunflowers. they walk around figuring out what to do, and you get that beautiful imac, just a little dome with the sunflower neck so there's integrity to it. everything they do whether it's plastic or titanium or metal, it's distinguishing apple from those commodity machines that dell and hp and compac were turning out. >> he makes an incredibly bold decision -- >> 2001, yeah. >> it's not going to be a computer company anymore. >> they used to take the top 100 and go on retreats, and everybody fought to get on the list. steve would cross off the bottom six or seven and say, you know, we can only do four, and it was stay focused. going back to apple, that was it.