under the control of the russian government. snowden the man and the theft. >> he did enormous damage. i don't know if his supporters even say he did no damage. maybe he did some good. he started a national conversation. he opened a subject of interest. trump is certainly right is this man has not based justice. -- faced justice. he deserves to face justice, whatever we decide that is. >> tonight on c-span. >> next, on history bookshelf, journalist walter isaacson talks about the personal life of steve jobs. cofounder of apple computers. this was recorded in mountain view, california. it is about an hour and a half.

walter: shortly after steve's tragic death, it went immediately to number one on amazon. ever since then it has dominated every bestseller list and every part of the world. walter isaacson has been at this for a while. he is not only a distinguished journalist, former chairman of cnn, former managing editor of time, next year will mark the 20th anniversary of his first major biography of henry kissinger. to that, he has added the biography of benjamin franklin, albert einstein, and now this book on steve jobs. we talked a few days ago about opening this evening with something special returning items from our landmark collection which you can see

on stage. what is going to have to introduce these guys with their black tournaments on. don't they look good? we have about 3000 items from apple, it is one of the largest collections of its kind in the world dealing with apple. after steve died, we would looking through the collections of what was the best of the best, we discovered something very amazing. this was a tape that regis mckenna had made in 1980 of a 25 -year-old steve jobs making a 22 minute presentation at stanford on the roots of apple and his vision for the company. we have digitized that and we have put it on our website. it is never been seen before. we will play about two minutes of it tonight. i hope you will be as amazed as we were when you see it. >> we had no idea what people were going to do with these before we started out. we couldn't afford to buy a

computer. we liberated some parts from hewlett-packard. we worked out of the design center for six months and decided we would build our own computers. so we built them. he was up till four in the morning for many months. everybody wanted one. it turned out that it took about 40 hours to build one of these. friends at similar companies that could liberate parts. we helped our friends to build computers. we get the idea that one day we could print circuit boards without the parts. we could probably cut the assembly time down to five hours or 10 hours. got 1300 bucks together to do

a layout. we thought we would buy a circuit board for twice what it was. that is what we did. i was out trying to peddle pc boards one day. i walked into a bike shop in mountain view. the bike shop said he was going to pay for these computers, and i saw dollar signs in front of my eyes. them tested and ready to go. that was a new twist. we got the electronic parts distributors around here and we got about $5,000 worth of parts. we build 100 computers and we sold 50 of them for cash and off theys paid distributors. that is how get started.

>> ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming walter isaacson. [applause] >> it is good to see you. walter: how great it is to be here at the museum. >> thank you. walter: wonderful pleasure. can i give a shout out to steve wozniak? i just saw him and his wife. stand up. [laughter] walter: all the history is here. totally intimidating me because i will look over and they will be nodding and shaking their heads. it wasn't that way exactly. >> this is a silicon valley crowd. they will not be that polite. walter: oh dear. >> we are so happy to have you here. let me ask you about the very first meeting with steve jobs.

1984, you described yourself as a junior editor of the times. he comes to new york to demonstrate the macintosh. how does that go? walter: you see both sides. that absolutely passant side. you see him sitting there with the original mac. he shows us how thin it is. he shows us all the graphical icons, and you can tell he is passionate about every pixel. he is also furious at time magazine, tells us that we are not nearly as good as newsweek. some guy had written a horrible story about him. i saw the petulant side. that is when i first started to realize the impatience and petulance you sometimes saw in steve jobs was connected to the -- ion and

>> did he make a particular impression on you at that moment? >> i was mesmerized. he is very compelling person. you saw it there. that is what he was. he's telling the stories. he was mad because he had not been made man of the year. i was an idiot on the wrong side and i voted for paul volker. none of your remember who he was. but we had done the machine. it was machine of the year. you could tell the first time he et steve jobs that there was something compelling about him. >> flash forward 20 years to 2004, he gets in touch with you. walter: he gives me a call. we talked a little while. he said he wanted to come take a walk with me. he says why don't you do a

biography of me? i had done ben franklin, i was finishing albert einstein. so i thought, ok ben franklin, albert einstein, steve jobs. that is a progression. i said you are great subject but let's wait 30 years until you retire. it wasn't until 2009 when he had his liver transplant that it sort of suck in that he was fighting cancer. he had transformed with his team a wide variety of industries. first home computing, but by that point, by 2009, it had transformed the music industry with itunes and the ipod. the way we listen to music, the phone industry, the publishing industry, tablet computing. that is when i said all right, this is too good to pass up. >> do you have a theory about him going into this?

>> i had a theory because our very first phone call when we started talking about it, he told me something that edwin land had said to him. he said you always want to stand in the intersection of liberal arts and sciences. right there between the humanities and technology or engineering. that is something that we lost in the cp snow era. you either were in the humanities or in the sciences. others, wasmong that connecting creativity to wonderful feats of engineering 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. you must have had to raise that and settle that early on.

how did you manage to do that? walter: i was stunned that it never came up. then, after a while, he kept saying, it is your book. i am not even going to read it. he did say, people don't read books. he said i wanted to be honest. i want you to interview people who didn't like being as well as people who did. he said that he was brutally honest. his whole life, he did not want it to feel like an in-house book. he wanted it to feel like an independent book. therefore, he was going to exercise no editorial control. >> did that ever change? walter: the one time he did, which fits into his theory of people don't read books but they look at them, simon and schuster put into the catalog a cover design that was a placeholder. it was a cover of steve and an "i, steve" as a

title. i landed in san francisco airport coming to a product launch he was going to do. i saw six or seven missed calls from steve jobs. [laughter] you all know the san francisco airport. i'm standing there in the concourse. i hit return. he just starts yelling at me. he says you have no taste, the title is gimmicky. it is ugly. i don't want you to come to the demonstration. i am holding the phone, you know. finally, he says i am not going to continue to cooperate unless you allow me to have input into the cover. all right. it took me somewhere between a second and a second and a half to say sure. he has the greatest design for something like that, and he has spent a lot of time trying to

make it a simple, clean cover. that was the one time i felt his wrath. also the one time he had editorial input. about, and youot his his friends -- quote friends who coined the term "reality distortion field." did you find yourself sucked into that? theer: i think you would be last to know. he would talk to me about it. the engineers that come from a star trek series. simply by thinking something and being convinced of something, even if it is impossible, you can convince other people. the secret of the reality distortion field is that it sometimes works. you convince people they can do the impossible. oz talked to me about that.

you have to do this in four days. i think it was one of the atari games they were doing. woz said that it cannot be done. steve said you can do it. that was the reality of the distortion field. i found myself deeply emotionally invested with him. , i tried very hard to be honest in the book. to put all things and all sides in the book. there will be people in this audience who know more than most if you read the book and say this guy got caught in a reality distortion field. i guess the answer would be yes. >> one final question about the process of writing, and then we will move on.

had the luxury of a long historical detachment from einstein, benjamin franklin. not so much with kissinger. here you are writing a biography of a very compelling living person, up close and personal with him in 40 interviews. how does a biographer maintained that necessary detachment that you can enjoy just by not getting to spend time with einstein or franklin? walter: when steve did his stanford speech, he said limit three stories. you become a storyteller, you don't try to preach. i just try 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. einstein, they are so compelling his papers. -- compiling his papers. we have one little journal entry here, maybe a newspaper clip. with steve, everything that happened, i hear about it at great length. then i hear other people possible versions of it. i probably ended up knowing 100 times more about him and a story in the book then you would doing somebody who is doing it through letters or journalists. >> lets talk about the storytelling. the place i would like to begin is his partnership with steve wozniak. walter: that starts with him. steve was on the night shift because they find it easier to work with him if he is on the night shift.

he learned a lot at atari. the notion of how to do some subchips. you have to remember that pong had to be so simple that a stoned freshman could figure it out. 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 when esquire magazine wrote about cap'n crunch and the people who can replicate the system tones. a lot of that was steve jobs saying that we have to do this. they found the bell system

manuals and made an analog version that did not quite work. steve wozniak goes off to berkeley. they make a digital version of it. you see the partnership. i can't see steve wozniak and whether or not he is shaking his head or not. he comes up with this amazing circuit board and loves to show it off. steve says we can package it and sell it. we can make money. they start going door to door selling this thing. at one point, testing it out by calling the vatican with woz pretended to be henry kissinger. as far as i can tell, they never really got the pope on the phone. the entire college of cardinals was eventually smart enough to figure out that it was not henry kissinger calling.

steve told me that when he described that story and the whole blue box story that if it had not been for the blue box, it would not have been apple. >> what could they do together? walter: they complimented each other well. he would say of woz that he could have way better circuit boards. woz had been taught by his father, being an engineer. he never thought about putting it in a package. maybe we should get a good sour -- power supply. maybe we can sell it. what steve did was take great ideas and come up with a great vision and pull it all together

to do something amazing. that was a perfect partnership for somebody who can design a circuit board with one quarter of a number of chips that any other engineer would take to make it work. >> the process of invention is not a singular endeavor. it is not one person sitting in a room, finding that moment. it is about that collaboration. when you take up einstein, was there a relationship? have you found that these kinds of relationships occur over and over? walter: with einstein, it was a true, solo act. especially the greatest and most elegant of theories, general relativity. he is pacing alone in his apartment in berlin for months on end. steve, even though he was

sometimes tough on people truly created teams like the original macintosh team. they were bonded together as if they were pirates. steve was able to create collaborative teams. he did that his whole life. even now, the past eight or nine years at apple, you have had an intensely loyal, great, collaborative team. >> apple gets up and running. >> the apple 1, that is what you heard on the tape. they get up and running when woz creates a circuit board. then they put it all together.

steve decides they have to incorporate. the way the steve tells me the story, he worked on a commune around reed college. he was there, tended to the apples and come back from the apple farm and says ok, we will create a company. he gets all excited. not only will we create a product, we will have our own company. they have all sorts of executrix and personal computer things. steve says, what about just apple? kind of friendly, it has a width of counterculture.

it is also american as pie. >> they begin to work on the apple one and they are growing and they are putting this team in the early history of the post-incorporation period. they come on the scene and you need money. >> what they are doing is going from the apple one to the apple two. among the differences, they created a beautiful case, the plastic molding. it is going to cost a lot of money to do. you can't sell your calculator

to get the apple one. they need investment capital. they sign a line of credit. this gives steve a great piece of advice. it is a marketing concept with three concepts. one, he needs to focus. keep your focus. the other is empathy. not a perfect word for it, it is to make in emotional connection for the people who will buy your product. then the third is also not a great word. the word "impute" means to cast an aura around what you do. so that, the minute -- steve had his own personal name on the patents. when you open up and there was

that ipod cradle, you imputed that it was something really cool just the way it was. that is what the apple ii does. it imputes that is a very cool machine. >> even as primitive as it looks , he obsessed with the curve on the corners. >> he had been fascinated by the sony style. right when they moved out of the garage they were in a little office. next door is a sony showroom. when designed to a design conference, growing up in a joseph eichler home. they were massmarketed, simple, frank lloyd wright style homes for the everyman. it was that bauhaus style, simplicity.

the simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. clean, white, simple. that is the style for apple. , the apple this time ii takes off and they are selling hundreds of thousands of units. the phrase in the book surfaces "tempermental and bratty" it seems there is a very big breakout. there was a petulant side. it starts to grate on people. walter: he was temperamental. that is why he was on the night shift, this was not new. temperamental people also have the heart of an artist. he has a passion to have end to end control of a project.

there was an original president, mike scott, he tried to temper jobs. eventually, they bring in john skelly to try to handle steve. but with steve, you got the whole package. the temperamentalness was a part of it. it showed how he cared. i tell this story, with steve was by the house he grew up in and he showed me the fence. he built a fence with his dad. he said by that taught me to make the back of the fence as beautiful as the front. i asked him why. i said nobody will ever know. my dad said but you will know. even with the apple ii he wants the circuit board to be beautiful. when they get to the macintosh,

even though you can't open it, he holds it up for a while. the chips of the circuit board were not aligned. they told him the same thing, nobody will know, no one can open it. he said you will know. what is interesting is that he had the passion of an artist to have end to end control. hardware integrated with software. on the apple 2, it has 8 slots. you could check into it. you could open it up, you begin to the circuit board. steve was against having slots. he didn't want anyone to have an open source on the lyrics. he didn't want people jacking in

and opening up. woz insists that he wants them to have these slots. the macintosh doesn't, they don't even have screws. that was very steve jobs like. all the way through his career, really believing and tightly controlling like the gardens of kyoto that he loved to visit, carefully walled, carefully tended by one artist. there is so much going on. >> his personal courtship of john skelly is happening. walter: it was a bad mistake. it was almost like he saw john skully as a father figure or mentor. scully really wanted to be cool and hip and wanted steve's approval.

a famousle, there was line, the apartment that he was thinking of buying, he brings john skully up and says do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugar water or do you want to do something meaningful? he is a man of cap school -- prep school sensibility, great manners. it is hard for him to deal with conflict. steve felt the price. steve said the price of admission of being with me is i is be able to tell you that you are full of it. you need to be able to tell me i'm full of it. we need to be able to duke it out.

skully was not worrying about that. he was a marketer. he did not worry about the product. it was shelf space marketing. i think that steve felt that skully didn't get into how awesome the mac was. it didn't help that it was great and he priced macintosh at 2500 bucks. microsoft started dominating the computer business and so i think their relationship was doing fine as long as apple is doing fine and the apple ii was a workhorse. the mac didn't. there is a horrible falling out that culminates on memorial day in 1985.

>> before we talk about the falling out, let's talk about the design of the macintosh itself. this is the point in the book where you insert the famous quote from jobs. good artists copy, great artists steal. he did that from picasso. i have always been shameless about stealing great ideas. walter: they take two visits to xerox parc. xerox had come up with the concept of the desktop metaphor. the graphical interface, a bit map design. these pixel on the screen could be mapped to fit in the microprocessor. you can make a beautiful machine.

you and i are young to remember it. we remember we have to do those green letters with c prompt and whatever command. it was god-awful. suddenly, time magazine, we get the mac. you can drag and drop. i do a whole section on the visit to xerox parc. the misconception is that they took the graphical interface from xerox parc. it took years from some of the most amazing designers to take what the metaphor that xerox used and to make a great. xerox came out with something before the mac came out. i think it sold like seven . it was a bad machine. what they did was take that

metaphor and take the mouse with three buttons and simple fire. you will be a look to click and drag and drop and double-click and open things up. you can have documents looking like the top of other documents. it was like a messy desktop. none of that was in the xerox original graphical interface. i think they take the xerox metaphor and actually make it insanely great. secondly, tsl is lining up. this falls between conception and reality. they were able to execute on it. it is true that part of steve's genius was looking at a thousand ideas at any given point and saying that one is great. this one sucks. we're going to ignore this one. but pulling together ideas including ideas from xerox parc. >> this is one of the times

where he is pushing this team incredibly hard. reality distortion field is than coined. >> one of the engineers is in charge of the bootup of the machine. steve says it is taking too long to boot up. you need to shave 10 seconds off the boot up time. he says i can't. steve says " if you could shave ten seconds off of saving a life, would you?" he goes "yeah." he multiplies it out and says that 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 shaved off 28 seconds.

everything about that, you see the screen. it is a rounded rectangle. i think i will be corrected. i think it is atkins who is doing the primitive that you can put on the screen. he does a square which is easy. then he does a circle which is hard. the microprocessor doesn't do square root. steve says you need not only a rectangle in a circle but a rectangle with rounded edges. the guy says no, that can't be done. why do we need it? steve walks around the neighborhood parking lot pointing at things like windshields and the boards and no parking signs and screens and computers saying rounded are what people see every day.

they are more beautiful to look at. atkinson came up with a permit to do a rounded rack. he fretted over them. even doing the fonts, steve was there, he had taken the calligraphy course. he was caring about the spacing of those fonts. >> the perfection he was taking at that point was an almost impossible task. it was engendered in the book as he reported it. two completely different camps it seems to me. people who worked for jobs at that point. there were people who push you and you think you'd be better for. there are others who say it is

the worst experience of their life. >> a lot of people felt both. it was an agonizing experience. especially with the macintosh team. even in 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 of my life. >> it premieres, it is a great commercial. a legendary commercial. talk about his view of it. >> the 1984 ad is interesting. steve jobs does have the heart or soul of a misfit. a rebel and a misfit in fact.

the 1984 ad is an incredible cultural landmark and icon. obviously because of the george orwell novel. we had been thinking up until then of computers as being centralizing and controlling. the province of pentagon and the power structure and big corporations. the notion that a computer can be personal and empowering to the individual had grown up a bit in opposition to that. sort of the store brand catalog of doing computers for the people. steve was in that mentality. he also liked to think of himself as part of the hacker ethos. the problem with him thinking like that is that he doesn't want slots and he doesn't want you to be able to hack in. in some ways he has violated the

hacker etos by creating an appliance you can't open up as opposed to putting your own software here. he wants to assert that i am still part of that hacker ethos. fighting the establishment. ridley scott, who just filmed blade runner, films it in london. it is the woman being chased by the thought police. a brother is on the screen, droning. she decimates big brother. apple introduced macintosh. 1980 won't be like 1984. they show it at a board meeting and all the board members hated it.

>> skelly is so frightened of it, he says he will scale back the advertising time on the super bowl and not run the ad. steve is furious. woz says let's pay for the add. they don't need to. lee cloud a beach bum of a brilliant genius says we can't sell the time back. they defy and not sell the time. the ad runs. it runs once nationally. it becomes the best advertisement of all-time. >> it doesn't sell well.

>> we should show it. >> is on youtube. >> we can get the rights for that. it is a wonderful commercial. steve is removed from running the macintosh division. that begins the end for him. his relationship with skully. there is a massive blowup, you go in the book day by day, that fateful week in may. he tries to start a counter crew. during that week, he brings people up to his house. they all sort of plot that steve should not take over the company. it is one of the great learning experiences but he feels abandoned.

he had been having some of abandonment issues of being adopted. they all go around the room and vote against him. they abandoned him. he really takes it hard. >> how does he recover from that? when he talked to you about that. what did he say? walter: he described vividly every single day of that week, including where the food came from when he was serving on the patio when they are trying to bring mike markel around. >> this is almost 25 years later? ande goes to your up bicycles around. he talks to some people and talks about doing next computer. by the end of 1985, he has

recruited a handful of people. it is getting really bad. the board and skully thinks he is stealing their people. he creates next. he says being fired liberated me and helps me change. i think it was the experience at next their liberated him and matured him more. at next, there was no board of directors sitting on him. there was no ceo robin. he could indulge every instinct. his instinct for design against paul rand, -- he gave him $100,000 to do the next logo. he gets beautiful headquarters with patented staircases. you can see them now in apple stores. he wanted next to be a perfect cube.

those of you know, usually there is a draft angle so that you can actually pull it out of its mold. it had to be exactly 90 degrees. they had to do special manufacturing, it had to be matte black. he was indulging this insane drive for perfection. including building the factory and having it in pure white and having it be robotic. it is a glorious machine that is an absolute market failure. at the very first macintosh off-site, he does a series on the whiteboard. the first one is don't compromise. that is a great inspiring maxim. it is not a great way to run a business.

said compromises make great democracies. he finally realized that you don't have to compromise or -- your principles, you have to have some sense of balance. that is what he learned at next. >> simultaneously doing pixar. walter: pixar is the intersection of art and technology. a friend of him brought him to george lucas to meet some of george lucas's people. steve thought that was really cool. he thought he could make it for consumers. that never really took off but there was one guy working there who was in charge of making sure

to show off how cool the machines were. is history, it leads to toy story. pixar becomes a transformative thing in the animation business. >> he says of a view in that book, the strain of running pixar and simultaneously next was on him physically. he said that he thinks that had to do with him getting cancer. >> i don't think you can get cancer from working hard or stress. he felt it was great stress. it was driving up to pixar. then when he goes back to apple, he is juggling quite a few things.

i think that was a time of great stress in his life. also, some unhappiness. next is not doing very well. those machines are not selling. pixar was a hardware-software company. nobody is buying pixar except for disney. they bought a few pixar imaging machines. pixar only sold a few to disney. >> it is also one of the most periods.time he is hemorrhaging money at both companies for it well. apple was his baby, it was his child. he was deeply frustrated that it was being screwed up.

after a while, they were not inventing new products. the products sucked. they were coming out with new lines of macintoshes, just not better. they couldn't even create a new operating system. i think he is watching as people screwed up the wonderful baby he helped to create. >> eventually it leads to his triumphant return. walter: he says i have to buy an an operatingpoint system. he looks at microsoft. adopting windows would have been weird. then there is this amazing operating system. there is a unix kernel to it. that is exactly what apple needed. eventually, apple decides they have to buy next to get the

operating system. but then you buy next to get steve jobs. i'm not sure what woz said. i think it was gil amelio, meet steve jobs, game over. collects you to level story amelio tried to resist that. then begins one of the greatest decades that any corporation has ever had. walter: totally stunning, first of all, he creates -- hadrings delegates, he falling outs. bill gates comes back and word and xl for the new os. he also truly focuses on design.

you all remember and probably remember here, the first imac. when he first goes back to apple in 1997, they form this bonding and they create the imac. johnny eyes sketches it out. it looks like a rabbit that is hopped up on your desk. they make it translucent and go to jellybean factories to see how you make it look right. they let you see the circuit board inside. johnny comes up with the notion that even though it is a big desktop machine up putting a recessed handle on it. that will cost to much money. why would you want to handle? what steve and johnny understood is that computers were still intimidated to people. the handle gives you permission to touch it. it says i am at your service.

just by having that handle, even if you didn't use it, you felt that the computer was being deferential to you. that beautiful design, when they have flat screens, they take the imac and johnny design something with that and says no. steve says the integrity of the flatscreen, you have screwed it up. he goes home and johnny comes back to steve's house in the backyard, there are all these sunflowers, they walk around and try to figure out what to do. finally, you get that beautiful imac. everything they do, whether they are playing with plastic, titanium, metal, it is distant -- distinguishing apple from those commodity machines. >> once the rights the ship, he makes this decision in 2001.

it won't be a computer company anymore. >> they used to go on retreats. everybody would try to get on those retreats. finally they would get list of -- we can only do for every four. when he went back to apple, that was it, focus on four things, desktop, laptop, professional. when he nails it and gets that right, the top of the list is consumer devices. what he does is he realizes that the having and to and control of the hardware and the software, you can create a digital hub where you put your video camera connected to your computer and middle -- maybe like your video.

the one thing he screwed up slightly was that he wanted a tray slot in the newer imacs. he was furious. he wanted one of those pure slots. it meant you couldn't burn music cds when panasonic and other copies came out with music cds. he is so focused on video, he calls up adobe and says you have to make your video editing software for the new mac os. unlike bill gates, the people of adobe said no, you have to small of a market share. he never really forgave adobe. that is why flash does not work on your ipad. the mark of a good company is

not what you think of things first, it is when you fail to think of things first,can you leapfrog? can you catch up? others were making cd burner trays. everybody was downloading from napster and burning cds. you couldn't do it that well on the apple. he had to leapfrog. we have to make a perfect and to anything. the store, the music, the device itself, when they start making the ipod, he makes it so simple because it is and the two and integrated. you can take the complexity and put it on the mac and the itunes software. the device itself is not one of these complicated mp3 players where you had to figure out how

to do it, you have to look at it. it was intuitive. he kept saying i want to be able to get to where i want. every song i want or every function i want in three clicks. he drove them and drove them until the ipod becomes perfect. that is when he leapfrog's and does the music. that took apple into the digital hub business. it was really bit with the ipod and music. the ipod is hugely successful. he starts to worry what will kill it. he realizes people putting music on their phones will kill it. so he focuses and does the iphone and does it this way. there was an ipod modifier, there was a track wheel, it was not good for a phone.

many other people were goaded on by microsoft. there was this notion of a touchscreen technology. when he finally sees how the touchscreen can work, he says that does it how we will do the iphone. you have a series of consumer devices from the decade it -- beginning in 2001. that totally transformed the industry. >> he is bending other industries at the same time in the direction of his vision. the music industry, disney. >> retailers, he can't abide the fact that he is making these insanely great products. they are being sold by big-box stores. he comes up with the notion of the apple store. that is not a store but a whole branding exercise.

just that notion of bending industries for the ipod and itunes store to work. you had to convince seven record companies to put other music -- all their music on itunes. the songs were $.99 initially. none of the music companies liked it. sony was trying to do the walkman. they had a great music division. nobody wanted to come aboard. steve personally brought the itunes software to the time warner building and showed it to roger ames at warner music and got him aboard. and you had doug morris at universal. encircling sony. no other ceo would have been so passionate about going at people until they surrendered. sony was the last holdout.

andy lack was running sony music. he has to surrender. the one thing that steve wanted was early dylan. he wanted dylan. he wanted to do all of bob dylan's tracks. sony says no, i will jab it to him. i need leverage. steve calls bob dylan. bob dylan is slightly spacey. he doesn't really deal with it. dylan takes the money for staying out of itunes.

a year later andy lack is moved out of sony. dylan's box set does go on to the itunes store. he invented an ipod commercial. it helps dylan more than the ipod. itunes and the ipod has such a cachet that him doing that at introduced him to another generation. >> my expression is meant to say where do i start? i want to ask you one more question about the final chapter. you write, if reality did not comport with his will, he would

ignore it, as he had done with the birth of his daughter and would do a few years later when diagnosed with cancer. the question people wanted most wanted me to ask you tonight was why when he was first diagnosed, did he undertake all of these natural, nonmedical solutions? >> there were two sides to steve jobs at all times. whether it's his personal life, cancer, professional life, the products he makes. there's the counterculture, alternative, romantic, since ability of steve. and there's the hard core engineering, scientific side of steve. and the cancer was no different. both sides kick in and he spends a lot of time wrestling with the two alternatives. wrestling with alternative treatments and diets. but also, as i say in the book, didn't get as much, having his d.n.a. sequenced, having

targeted therapies done. unfortunately, it takes some month before he does what he does in every other aspect of his life, is find the perfect synthesis of something that is very scientific and also comports with his alternative view of things. he does. it takes longer. it was implied had he gotten operated on right away or something, he might have stopped the cancer. we don't know that. cancer spreads in mysterious ways. so it is 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 he does in his life ends up being a synthesis of that hippie rebel with the guy who in the hewlett-packard geek explorers club.

>> interesting. i'm going too start with a couple 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 was right when the book first came out and people were quickly reading it and pulling out anecdotes treated it was the petulance and impatience of his character was a weird thing. his own personality was integrated, including with his profession and the products he made, just like apple products are integrated so that perfectionism, or bratty temperament. that's not a disconnected thing that has nothing do with the

passion for perfection or the product, you know, drive that he had. and so i try -- that's what the last chapter is about -- to show how all of this was woven together. >> words like petulant and bratty are also maybe a little euphemistic. there are much stronger words you use in the book from time to time. >> i remember i was at time inc., and at one time, "fortune" was doing a story involving his cancer because they reported the cancer treatment first, not my book. steve was furious and called up the editor and the editor in chief. i was there and heard the stories. and he says to the editor of "fortune," "wait a minute. you have discovered i'm an asshole? why is that news?" he was very self-aware he could be a strong cup of tea.

>> yeah. >> yeah. >> this is an interesting question. did he have to be who he was in that way to do what he did? >> that's the question i'm most asked. did he have to be that way? did you have to be that way to get done what you did? and i'm going to back off a little from giving you a great answer because i'm a story teller. i had to write about the person who was in front of me. that's who we has so i wrote the story of him. this is not a how-to book. this is not a manual for, you have to be this way to run a company. of course you don't. very nice people run very successful companies and there are 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 the story, and part of the story is being driven or is euphemistic. 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 when you say, did he have to be that way? my only job is to tell you the way he was because i'm just a biographer, not a preacher or management consultant. >> do you think that question will be answered with the sort of the luxury of distance and time? >> yeah. i mean, i guess -- christianson is another great management guru who could probably do a case study. "60 minutes" was saying, did he have to be so hard, 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, and correlate it somehow with the regression analysis and say who is more successful. but that's way above my pay grade. [laughter] >> are you writing the screen play and would you choose george clooney? [laughter] >> i am not. the reports of the movie are premature. way overdone. i am not involved. >> could you see george clooney? >> i am not a movie person. steve went over every frame of pixar movies the way he went over every curve of the first macintosh. and he would say something about "finding nemo," and i remember

having to go back and quickly download the 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 make really bad movie cover calls. so, asking me who should play what in a movie is -- >> all right. we'll give you a pass. i'm going to read you the preface. it says on behalf of historians, what were steve's stipulations about using the interviews you collected for the book and where will they ultimately be deposited? >> most of them are notes. some transcript of the four or final 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 would say -- you know, say something just

offhanded, especially steve, about certain things. and there are things i didn't put in the book and things i would have to take out of my notes just because they were unnecessary to understanding steve. and probably in the interests of kindness, you don't want to hurt people with certain comments. so, i will some day go through my notes and -- if it's the 20-year rule, maybe some of the things will have gone by the wayside. >> someone picked up on the quote about great artists steal, and said, he said that, yet he resented bill gated and google and many others for stealing from apple, as he saw it. how did his zen self reconcile this? >> steve was not an expert at reconciling conflicting things.

[laughter] >> anderson and many others have great quotes about people having conflicting thoughts at the same time. steve was totally ballistic first at bill gates and microsoft for ripping off, as he put it, the macintosh graphical interface. and then famously berating 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. 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 he has some right to

feel that he came up -- or apple came up with the beautiful macintosh operating system and it is pretty much copied by windows. and likewise, the mobile operating system. you can argue this 10 years in court, and there was an argument, about whether you can copyright the look and feel, whether there's an intellectual property theft there. but i can understand why he was pissed off. >> in his mercurial -- a great story in the book about his -- mercurial, i love the word. >> and dictatorial style. how was he able to engender such loyalty -- let's go to mercurial. >> so he is showing off the next computer at symphony hall here when it's been unveiled and he helped invent digital books. but he put a thesaurus and shakespeare's book, and he is

showing off the thesaurus and he says sometimes i'm called mercurial. he says, let me look it up and it says changeable moods and then it described another word, somebody who doesn't have enough emotions. and he says, maybe it's not so bad to be mercurial. so i think he understood his mercurial nature and that was part of who he was. and having said that. i've now forgotten the second half of the question. >> given he was that way, how did he engender such creativity? >> 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 -- sucks, you got to make it better. by the time you've created as an engineer the original macintosh, you're 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 cliches like this, proof is in the pudding -- but look at the team he even has at apple. reviews that bad of a boss, why do so many a-players stay with him? because he like to be on a team with only a-players. if he ran off the b-players, that doesn't mean the team at apple filled with a-players -- they're quite loyal to him. >> can you tell us about the relationship between larry ellison and steve jobs? >> larry says best friends. it was a deep friendly relationship. one of my favorite anecdotes is late '96 when the question of

steve coming back to take over apple is first being kicked around. 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 set it into motion again and 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 say, if you do it and come back that way and it makes it a great company again, how are we going to make money if we don't invest in it and buy it? and they were walking along a beach. and steve grabbed him by both shoulders and says, larry, this is why it's important i'm your friend, you're don't need anymore money. [laughter] i won't go there.

>> a couple more questions. let me just ask you quickly about the current technology, this great conversational interface that siri represents. did he talk about that with you, what the vision for that is? >> yeah. i do think that the simplest, 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 and i was careful in the book, even though he told me a lot of things in detail what he wanted to do, i decided, you know, i shouldn't put in things in that he might not be able to do and that apple may be working on for the next couple of years. but at the last board meeting when he tenders his resignation as c.e.o., they have a lunch afterwards. all the engineers bring out the various things they're working on. and one of them which i knew was coming out soon was this voice

recognition thing. and they know steve is not feeling well but he has been brought into the meeting so he is going to try to make it look bad. so he asks what is now called siri, do i need an umbrella, and it says, the prediction is for sunny day tomorrow in palo alto. so, it really is doing the beautiful thing. so finally steve says, are you a man or are you a woman? and they all kind of hold their breath because he is trying to trick the machine, and siri is very good. the two layers, and it says, they have not yet assigned me a gender. [laughter] >> and they all breathe a sigh of relief and steve thinks its great. he loves that technology. by the way, bill gates and everybody has been trying to crack voice recognition. >> yeah. what do you think of the apple that he leaves behind? you talked about the team and

the great group he has built. there's rumored to be this product road map that goes on and on. but the history of technology companies with a founder like this, is 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 the board and does that lunch, somebody at the lunch makes fun of h.p. because that day or that week it had gotten out of the tablet business, was getting in or out of the pc and was totally confused. steve said, wait a minute. he stopped the person making fun of the troubles at hewlett-packard. bill hewlett and me my first job.

those 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 bozo is motion so there was only a great team of a-players. a simple, simple thing that thee stands for, which is intersection of great activity -- creativity and engineering and technology. he said, that's what disney did. that's what a lot of people have done. there are companies that last. is almost 101 years old. i think apple has imbued its genetic code this desire to d rive great design and artistic

creativity with great engineering and technology. and it will be at that intersection, and the people there now are capable of keeping it at the intersection. 10 years from now, 25 years from now -- disney, of sundown. but you still know what disney stands for and it doing fine right now after a couple of rough patches since walt disney died. i would to wager -- wager that a generation from now, even a century from now, apple will still exist at the intersection of the humanities and the technology. about steveestion jobs. 100 years ago, the great industrialist and philanthropist carnegie, rockefeller, mellon,

build institutions as well as corporate legacies. and that legacy survives. he lived longer, might have done the same thing. he chose not to do it for whatever reason now. apple, but it's built on a shifting center of technology. built on a shifting center of technology. what do you think the legacy of steve jobs will be as people look back on him in this era? >> the last five or six pages of the book is just him talking about legacy. it is something that putting something back in the flow of .istory i asked what was his greatest creation. ipad or whatever. he said no, apple the company. come and go. but the hard part is making a that will continue to

make good products. that will continue to make good products. the legacy will be somebody who truly transformed industry after industry by pulling together great ideas and driving the technology to support them. look at the ipad. people made fun of it. there were all sorts of articles, white -- what is that? now -- whether i walk into a doctor's office or anywhere else, it is transforming industry after industry. $2 million last year just in the industry of creating apps for it. the textbook industry. carnegie was great with education philanthropy. bill gates was great with education philanthropy. changeend, the ipad may

education as much as any of the carnegie schools. i think he's got a pretty solid if you look at each of those industries he transformed. >> so, we often ask our authors to do a short rating at the end. to read thegreed of the biography. i wonder if you would do this now. , i do say dogs is supposed to have the last word but this is one of steve jobs -- even though he did not impose his legendary control, i suppose that would not be conveying the right-field for him. oni just shuffled them without letting him have some of the last words. i 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 one sunny afternoon in the back garden of his house, he wasn't feeling well, and he reflected on death. he talked about his experiences in india almost 4 decades earlier, his study of buddhism, his views on reincarnations, and his views on spiritual transcendence. about 50/50 on believing in god, he said. for most of my life, i have felt there must be more to our existence than meets the eye. end quote. he admitted that as he faced death, he might be overestimating the odds out of a desire to believe in the afterlife. quote, i like to think that something survives after you die. it is strange to think that you accumulate all the sixth aryans and maybe a little wisdom, and it just goes away.

so i really want to believe that maybeing survives, that your consciousness endures. and then he fell silent or longtime. and then he said, on the other hand, perhaps it's just like an on/off switch, he said. click, you die, you're gone. caused again, long pause, and he smiled slightly. and maybe that's why i never liked to put on off switch is on apple devices. [laughter] that's the end. >> since its official opening last september, the national museum of african american history and culture welcomed over 750,000 visitors straight on sunday, february 19, american history tv on c-span3 takes you inside the museum for a life,

exclusive after-hours tour. our special includes a look at the galleries and exhibits telling the african american story, from slavery to the first african-american president. we will talk with a museum specialist and curator, and throughout the program, we will be talking to you and hearing your input via your phone calls and tweets. join us for an exclusive i've visit. sunday, for every 19, beginning at 6:00 p.m. eastern on american history tv on c-span3. >> monday night on "the communicators," the new chair of the house subcommittee on communications and technology, tennessee congresswoman marsha blackburn, on her priorities for the subcommittee and how she expects communications and tech issues for change this year with the republican administration, and a republican-led fcc. representative blackburn is interviewed in a congress reporter for "communications daily. >> making certain that we

address what i view as having been an opportunity get, communities that do not have broadband, that they are not able to go in and expand educational opportunity for their students, they are not able to utilize telemedicine and health care informatics. they are not able to recruit new factory that can bring jobs to those underserved areas. >> watch "the communicators" monday night at 8:00 p.m. eastern on c-span2. tvrecently american history was at the american historical association's annual meeting in denver, colorado. we spoke with professors, authors, and graduate students about their research. this interview is about 13 minutes. >> we are with a princeton university phd candidate. also,