In 2007. And the other is his integration of each one of the technologies. And those two stories come together. Why did you take that approach and just take us back to the start of the book project itself. Guest yell. Well, so the idea for the book really kind of began with sort of the start was a ship that this thing that is so fully integrate itself into a lease my own life and the life of my peers and so on and so forth with something that it really didnt understand particularly well. A lot of us had that moment i think when we are abruptly and suddenly to go without it for a second when in this case i locked it in a cab. When i was retrieving the phone i would stand in line at dmv. Of course i jettison all my responsive as for the day immediately, put off the meetings at work, put off any other obligation. You just get the phone back. Thats what you do when you lose your phone. Its kind of like started gelling in my head like what is it about this one device that gives it his power . Theres very little else i can imagine being forced to do such a thing. And as i sort of resolved the kind of big into this too peerless green off to to understand how it works, to see it more than just a consumer product, i sort of start to realize there were two stories. There was this one story, the history of the phone itself, how will steve felt at apple. That was carefully guarded by apple itself, the corporation which is very good at controlling, keeping secretive its narrative and the other side of the story might have more work than a steve jobs keynote presentation. And then, in parallel to that theres a story about any technology has to develop, and that requires much more vast timelines, much more input, much more complexity. So i kind of wanted to look at both of them in tandem and see how one post on the other. In the way the chapters that are not about apple about sort of the development of this sort of technological buffett line that apple was then able to come along and say we want that for our phone, we want this, we want multitouch. We will use this lithium ion battery because thats who i think slender enough and powerful enough to rent. We will use this ship that uses very Little Energy but is also a formidable processor, and then theres the story to how they integrate each of those pieces which is the story in apple. I try to double. Host early on and theres this breakdown, great moment of epiphany we get your phone torn apart. Explain that and what you learned. Guest exactly. That moment came early on because it was the very first thing i did was, look at this phone, which is pretty much all screen. And say okay, the first step is to find out whats actually in this thing. So i took it to i fix it which is a Company Based in san luis obispo, its a refurbished car dealership that they kind of transformed. Its a cool place, great staff there. Their mission is to kind of keep gadgets repairable and keep transparency about whats inside them alive. What apple wants to do is make us think of this thing as something that only they can provide, only they can fix, only they can have the power to sell, market, and then put into the aftermarket. These guys are like no, no, no this is something you bought your subject this is an object that can be fixed, tweaked if you so desire so yeah i took it to them and they screwed it off. They are very skilled repair and breakdown technicians. The guy was called a teardown engineer, which is a great job title if ive ever seen one. He just had walked me through this. He said youre to be careful of these cables right on top because these connectivity multitouch sensitive if you break them your cell phone will not work. Once the screen comes up you looking at this sea of gadgets and the batteries that have a realistic and you can start leaking through. Its this whole kind of world opens up. And that was kind of the moment that really sort of set off that epiphany youre talking about what its like okay, theres a lot in your in each of these bits has a story, and that kind of more or less if you will the table of contents for the second track of the book, getting down to each of those. Host just explain what it is, what it tells us what apples culture try to depend alone a signature screw that host a pundit probably try to apple doesnt want to see anybody to open up its it was a classic steve jobs mantra, just he was quoted in the isakson biography saying like we do want to let people into our stuff because they are just going to mess it up. It will just give them an opportunity to screw it up. That has sort of been instilled into apples design process ever since. It works very nicely, part and parcel to the tendency we want something small, compact, sealed up. But the penta lobe, you cant just go to your workbench and political driver and open up your phone, even though you bought it and you own it. You have to track down this custom tool that small enough to get into the screwdrivers, diesel screw see you can open it up and it sends a message that takes someone train come take some skill. This is not for anybody. Basically they are trying a think maybe perhaps indirectly to just kind of instill this idea that its to be bought. Its the upgrade ever yupik thats not to be fixed, not to be tampered with. Adds us a lot about apple i think. More broadly host more broadly you run through some things. One of them is the myth. This goes back forever. Isaac newton, physicist, starter says 17 century that i see further than others is because on because i have stood on the shoulders of giants. But the case you make in a book with scrupulous reporting is that this is particularly true for a product like the iphone. Elaborate on that point a bit, and some of this is, they kind of build on each other. Part of why this took off as a did is because its the timing of all these things coming together gratuitously, right, and then apple putting them together. But help me out and help us out with whats so striking in the kind of the complexity of this product . Guest right. Yeah, so i fully believe that of the most important thing in this book is that in this case come in the case of apple and the case of particularly steve jobs, steve jobs let apple, that myth of the lone inventor resonated powerfully. Its a compelling narrative and its a useful narrative for marketing a product. If you have somebody who is charismatic, clearly very smart, clearly sort of a master of industry, some like steve jobs can, and sell this product antenna forever be associated with it, when thats just a shade of the story. He was certainly hands on. He had a lot to do with it, but the truth is its like even the iphone insofar as it was developed at apple never wouldve happened without scores of people working around the clock to make it happen. And thats to say nothing of those deeper trendlines were talking about. With all the prior technologies. But you know, the tenth anniversary of the iphone is coming up and we see all these stories coming out and theyll have a picture of one person can steve jobs. Hes on stage and he, you know, he gives a commanding presence out our brain, its easy for us to process that, this guy handed it dow out and now we have the iphone. But exploring how these interlocking stories of innovation sort of took place is so important because, not just on the skill of actually all the breakthroughs at apple managed to do which i did manage to really sort of further the art and a lot of really important ways. On the engineering side they managed to get this technology called multitouch which allows us to swipe, zoom, all those, and vocabulary that translates into computing. They managed to get on glass in a really interesting way that had that been done before. I kind in josh had a big role n that, has a patent. The Human Interface Team got like all did amazing work designing these human interface that sort of makes the iphone was the iphone is. It is sort of i guess its like, its called the jingle of the iphone, its so much more than that but it is what makes it memorable, what makes it the experience. The little rubber banding effect. Host that is different. You didnt have to talk about it, you hold it, this is a departure. Guest exactly. All those trendlines were talking about coming together, the battery getting smaller, process of getting compact and lowpower enough. So Everything Else is at a point so its those little elements were apple really poured its work and heart and soul into furthering that part and going, this is how were going to make it stick out the this is how were going to make it something and who wants to use. Apple doesnt deserve an immense amount of credit for that but again part of the story is that the iphone was born as like the software interaction paradigm was born to behind steve jobs back. This group of guys called the ornery team like a document in the book started basically extremity. It was free wheeling research, it was fun. It was like wild kind of stuff. They had this crazy projector rate they were using to active or products together and what would become the iphone. Steve jobs had nothing to do with that from the beginning. Once he saw it in a form that was convincing enough when the demos were good enough, they were able to convince him to take it up, not before that. So the invention comes in so many different sources and they think its just important to sort of trace some of those disparate origin stories. Host the screen, swipe, tap, so forth is the defining thing that people see. Might want to drill down all of it on one. This guy Wayne Westermann you describe his company, is sort of soccer, telesat story because it ends up being, without it there is no iphone, right . Guest exactly. As a brief process, multiTouch Technology itself, did try to trace it back as like as i could go and i visited this guys name been stumped great name. Was a pioneer in Touch Technology. Also the World Wide Web [talking over each other] guest that was a fun little anecdote that it picked up that some of the first report of multiTouch Technology ever develop was basically a stones throw away from where tim did help the web and as for the iphone does so well. It integrates web and Touch Technology so you can touch your maps online. You can move through pictures. But anyways, been stumped maintains he developed some of the earliest multiTouch Technology just decades ago and since was public, since it didnt happen this stuff, got swept up into sort slipstream of technology that would wind up later in the iphone but the guy who would put on the table so apple could see it was Wayne Westerman us this incredible story produces brilliant engineer from the midwest who comes from a family that is plagued by disability and he had severe hand disabilities. When he was a phd student he was trying to write his phd dissertation and he just couldnt write. He had to stop. He looked around at the market to see if theres any alternatives to these hard keyboards, or which at the time read more cumbersome, and there were not any. So we trained some of the algorithms that he had been working on to try to start recognizing gestures and swiping. Pretty soon he came up with this bad that led into his phd, and seemed like a pretty Good Alternative for people that this problem with her hands. Instead it just always typing it was a much lighter touch and you could do a lot of things with swiping and gestures and the vocabulary was a lot fortunate will be can do with the iphone today. But he started manufacturing this product called single word and it was beloved by a small percentage of users. People like repetitive strain injuries, and people who are kind of like into creative computing kind of editors, music, Music Software users, people who are kind of thought it was cool that you could like swiping to gestures. It was an opaque black pad that you would use next use mouse are next to the keyboard. It wasnt on the screen yet. So a Junior Engineer at apple just happened to bring one of these in an an these guys i mentioned earlier are doing this sort of freewheeling experimentation saw this Junior Engineer, the finger works at edison whats that . That looks interesting. That literally became the focal point for their experiment and that was what was under the projector when they wheeled in a Projector Screen to combine this touch sensing unit. They put a piece of paper over it and then they beamed down the home screen of amec at the time, hacked the software that so you could touch. Thats what really spark the entire trajectory of the iphone project. Host that is a great backs forever his mother, chronic back pain as well. He has history of knowing this in the family, and then its at the delaware. Its that stanford or berkeley. Really kind of cool i thought. Guest that was one of my favorite stories to dredge up. He is still at apple site couldnt interview him on the record because he was behind the titanium curtains, as they say. I was able to get in touch with his sister who kind told his families back story. And its just fascinating how it really wise, it is one of those stories of overcoming adversity to sort of produce something that ends up helping a lot of people. Its not even the iphone now. Its the same basic technology in android, and its informing the language of how we talk to computers. Host let lets jump to one e places because this is, ill just read a paragraph and then ask you to elaborate. This is bolivia. Again, just fascinating back details. Bankrolled the spanish empire for hundreds of years. In the 16th century some 60 of the worlds silver was pulled out of this area. By the 17th century the mining boom had turned it into one of biggest city in the world, 160,000 people. Local natives, african slaves in spanish settlers living there making the investor hub larger than london at the time. More would come and the nun moun would swallow many of them. Between four and 8 Million People i believe to have perished therefrom caveins, freezing and starvation. So you go down there for what reason . Guest well, it turns out that apple sources some of its ten from this mine that used to bankroll the spanish empire hundreds of years ago. The same place, which was just incredible to me. Apple published for the suppliers and smelters where sources were it and its a pleasure to its metal and one of these is sourcing its metal from this mountain. And tin mostly comes from there and that tin is used in solder which holds the components in place and does a number of other things. Its just fascinating to me that this cutting edge device, this pain that is so integral to how we kind of think of the modern moment and what ostensibly propels the future is rooted in these same minds, being mined sadly by children sometimes with hand axes like pulled out of the rock, the depth pick its easy to disconnect these two ideas, the product to its origin. Thats just at the comes out of the earth. I thought it was important to spend a chapter looking at where it really begins in a physical sense, not just the sense of its history or the idea, away the actual physical material comes from. And its not just bolivia and its not just tin. Its tungsten. Its the cobalt for the batteries. Its lithium which is one of the more one night only mined materials that still has drawbacks, and that was nearby chilly when the mine lithium in one of the driest deserts on earth. Its everywhere. There are materials being pulled from every continent on earth just about, and all sort of feet into the iphone. Host you asked a consultant to do and all in exercise about how much might come if you will, how much of the earth and water is used to produce the x number of iphones we now have. Refresh my memory. This came out, it was a big number, right . Guest its a lot. Host you have to tear up a lot of ground to get a little bit, right . Guest Something Like 75 kilos or her every tiny 129 graham iphone. You are moving a lot the birth just to do that and that meijer using a lot of toxic chemicals and he focused on the sinai because sinai is often used to extract gold. Youre producing all these byproducts. For every single one of these is an exponential amount of earth that his mind. A funny thing since i published that part, i looked and dozens of other estimates that are even worse, that are even more this was on the conservative side. Basically if youre thinking about to get the aluminum out of the earth yet to have these huge and actual operations. Done in australia, to get the gold, you are drenching or in sinai sometimes to remove the stuff. The tin is coming from the labor intensive by hand sort of loosely cooperative mining structure. Theres all these different feet in spirit we are having a big impact on the planet by creating these small slender devices. Host among, how many miles did you log . Did you ever do a rough back of the envelope kind of calculation . Guest i didnt actually but i should. I should look at the iphone gps trackers to see if i can host how many steps. Lets go to china. You did visit the plant with these things are made and you got in. You are one of the few people have done that. This guy mike daisy who wrote a play, he poses like a contractor where you just sort of, there was a porous opening such as was. Tell us that story. Guest well, ive got to give the credit to my fixer, my translator who is a journalist in shanghai. We were just, i think were kind of imposing because we tried to sort of aboveboard channeled all they did we try to get into weve been anything people at the gates, all around. We were trying just to arrange a meeting. We even met a floor manager who manages an operation is said that when my taking a somewhat unique executive approval. The security guards were not having it. We basically burnt all day doing interviews time to get in, these are interviews outside at the gate. Guest outside the gate. Host little coffee shops. Guest exactly. Theres sidewalks outside of it. Theres a structure you can walk over. Host gives the dimensions. How many, this is x number of football, it goes on forever. What it looked like and then a decent sized city, right . Guest right. From the outside its deceptive. It seems like its all walled off. The wall goes on pretty much as far as you can see and theres buildings peeking up over it, but whatll happen is after trying to get in all the had to use the bathroom, legitimately pics about a so host you with their instead of okay, well let this guy and . Guest the idea kind of was like, you know what, maybe some genuine urgency or something and it did. Translated. Theres a bathroom that we could see my translator well come right back. Will come right back. Host and no one tells you . Guest not that we know of. We pretty literally ran. After we got in the bathroom and i ducked around and we just ran, and we were in. And once you are in it really does sink in. It feels like a city. Like we kept walking one direction until we hit the end and its kind of dilapidated. The buildings and things are rusty. It kind of like the docks at the edge of the city, right . People are playing a pickup game of basketball with the shirts on it looks like theres a minor Chemical Spill with light cones around and no one is really tempting to it. Its really this kind of come it felt like a little rough and retirement and started walking back in. And in this regard, i mean, this place was home to almost half a Million People at its height just in towering dormitories, giant factory blocks. You really just get the sense that you are just this tiny little, you know, insignificant sort of piece of organic matter navigating this huge sort of giant mission of industry. But like a city it kind of became more gentrified, more condensed. You got closer to downtown and slowly theres a center of little congress. Theres a 711 inside. Theres a cybercafe. Theres like one of those little flappy things of advertising like one of those mascot things. Host the age range of the people is what . Guest 1825. Host this is like the new england textile factories were in america. It was all 1622yearold women. By then that was it. So its that kind of system . Guest yet. It is, its all done by hand and, well, not all but people who come from rural areas to send a little bit of money back home they quickly become skilled workers, and most of them dont last all that long. A lot of people say you can only take it for a year. The plan was to work there for a year come and get new job, get out. Some of them that i interviewed said they were offered management positions or raises and its two ugly. The management culture, sort of the Work Environment was two ugly. I sort of felt that. This place, you know, was immense on one skilled but the more striking thing was that there was nothing in this entire city size factory that was designed to sort of cater to the human spirit. Like he was all either you are working in a factory, you are paying to eat and a cafeteria, youre paying to shop at 711. Theres nothing nice about, theres no nice public injury. Its all designed to squeeze the maximum value out of the person as possible. And meanwhile, your waged between a giant like gray factory blocks, and it just was, i can only [inaudible] guest and its something i can only like limit to my one drive. I spent about an hour and half inside of ther theirs i cant sy that i really, you know, i mea, theres another side to this. Host it used to be there were ten applicants for every job available. So it is everything you say is true by our standards. It is also there is an element to have much it is creating opportunity, right, for however great it may seem to be an take a given the Profit Margins of some of these products. That sort of the other side of it. In fairness to apple, as you describe, theyve done things on this front come having not, in terms of disclosure so forth. Elaborate a little on that. Guest they did do a number of things, and apple will do things that his competitors will not do. For instance, it will not tolerate child labor if it finds it in a supply chain. When it did discover one of its suppliers, one of the components was using child labor, it did shut it down and it will pay to send the child out and pay for the school and i kind of thing. And you did see like wages go up just a little bit, but i think the thing that kept coming up, the suicide that it was a famous are still happening, sadly. Thats more a product of this culture, his work culture that wont go away without more sort of, more sort of substantial reform to the way that just, that the work is carried out, the manager of culture so that kept it was so bad. If you mess up on your supply line you are asked to be publicly scolded, publicly humiliated by your boss. And a lot of that is sort of the catalyst for the depression and tragedy. So there has to be ways that apple as this huge most valuable company on the planet, this giant of the industry consort wield its influence to get things to a better place. Host you have dealt with the labor groups and so forth. Is there a suggestion or two that comes to mind that make sense to you, or is it the nature of the tradeoff is at least reasonable to consider . Guest right, yet. So there are a bunch of standards that after apple joined his business consortium, best practices things, and right now the biggest critiques in some of these labor groups like china made watches having kept the basic promises the if they work to do what they said theyre going to do, guarantee limiting things like overtime hours and making certain concessions to workers, that would go a great deal. Theres thinks god that he would like to see. Absolutely, it is absolutely a turnoff. People are absolutely coming from poor parts of china to work you for a because there is an opportunity. Host youve done the cost on the environment aside, the human toll where this looks more severe toll if you will. For the tradeoff looks particularly rough from our perspective. Where do you come out on this . Are you still using an iphone . And by the way, iphone is the Gold Standard but who knows with a samsung, right . Guest exactly. Thats the other important point is im using it kind of as a lens through which to view the way the industry works right now. Apple has more power than most because it has more resources, more capital and more influence. Samsung, which i have not invested personally, but i ensure it is a similar story. Yeah, you know, i personally feel like i would like to do more now. There are things like that verifone that really isnt this great project. Its this project and its an actual phone that they strive to get all the component from ethically sourced parts from places and they try to go down the supply chain and say hey, you do, this is possible. We can make an ethically built phone trend thats a science project or you can buy one . Guest you can buy one. It is. There are complaints its not quite as up to par with an apple user expense and whatnot. Host and it is an Android Phone i assume . Guest yeah. I do, i use an iphone. I think its just important to understand the full story and i think that we can all get a little bit more both to pressure apple to improve some of these things and to sort of just reseau bit of awareness about it. Host a highend job producing product in america, right, and wellpaying manufacturing jobs now in the southern part of the country but it comes from the l my region i guess according to that. Its the face of everything youve got. I mean come everybody kind of uses it. Its all but a monopolist, right . Its american kind of home grown from this little place in, you know, up in not suffer from bennington where i once worked, in upstate new york. Tell us the gorilla glass store because its really interesting, as is the history they kept chugging away at it. And the stuff they, it all speaks to your chain of progression with whatever it was, corning ware, work well in microwaves, and had this pet project with all the time. Tell us that story because its a neat one. Guest yeah, yeah, yeah. Corning which is an old American Company, classic American Company with glassmaker had stumbled mid century on to this, almost by accident one of the engineers had this mishap where he turned the oven on too high and when he was doing this experiment with lithium silicone i think, but it came out and this hard , you are talking several hundreds of thousands volcano. Guest it was an industrial oven and he came out and it was this sort of milky white glass that come when he pulled it out with the tongs it fell to the floor and adjust, just kind of like there are eureka moments. They happen by accident excessively think about eureka moment is that when they do happen they are kind of like these, they are mistakes but he pulled it out and the thing bounced and this is interesting. Went on to use this material for corning ware which was used both ends of like a nosecone of missiles as well as for dishware for casseroles and other kind of stuff you could stick in a microwave which had also just cannocan come onto the scene. It was sort of a perfect symbiosis, one of those things were two products help propel each other. I dont know if youre old enough you might member like i do host believe me. Guest those sort of white, blue Little Flower on it. I remember being served cashel in this thing, and they are microwave friendly and theyre pretty indestructible. That inspired corning to move beyond that and say okay, now this is cool but we are a glass company, we could make glass that was based on that we could see through . So the launch something called project muscle which was this effort to do exactly that. And they experimented working around the clock before and this is a case where they were just doing it for the sake of doing it. They didnt have an ideal promise in mind yet for what you wanted to do it so theres all sorts of fun stories about how their testing it. They are throwing it off the roof and tumblr form and it sheets of it and for some reason they were throwing frozen chicken step onto it from the roof, holding the glas class bew and it wouldnt break. So they said okay, we got the truly strong really cool stuff. Now what are we going to do with it . They help these demos in new york city and they said look, its unbreakable glass. This stuff is amazing. Now, come to us, companies, and buy from us. Theres all kinds of stuff. They had a few use cases they were putting together, they were thinking jails might want to use them as when does that people couldnt break through or maybe telephone booths. One of the few things the accident get them into was the cars for windshields that were shatterproof. It turns out they were little to start because there problems problems with people get in crashes and they ran their heads into them, you could really host shatter. Guest crash test dummies worse for the way. They couldnt find a use case for it so they shut down the project for decades. They had this technology. They had the knowhow. They just didnt have a use case. Fastforward to about, you know, 20062007 late stagedevelopment and steve jobs suddenly decides that the plastic screen theyre going to use on the iphone isnt going to cut it. You famously catapulted out of this meeting and had a bunch of scratch marks on it from where the keys had dented up the surface. And he said weve got to fix this, like what can we do . So apple launched internally this sort of slapdas flat dash o try their hand at material site and try the four one executive said i know this guy, the ceo corning. The jobs over and met with him and he told them about this secret project that had languished for decades and he just cant imagine it and job said we will take a we will take all of it that youve got. It was one of those classic sort of jobs moment sways like no, you can do and you will do it for me. They sort of, there was no assembly line. There was no production yet to scale for the stuff. Host before that, explain science to you. It wasnt just that production but about the science, whatever it was. Guest jobs had this classic habit of sort of being the smartest guy in the room and told like i dont think its going to work for us. Glassworks like this and is talking to see you of the Class Company who cant sit up and said, actually according to laura told him to shut up and said let me teach you some scientific went to the blackboard and showed him what and jobs listen. And was won over. And now its like you said, the surface of summary different screens and different smart gadgets. Host they produce in South Carolina or something . Guest kentucky. Trying to put a good factor in come into place a didnt have was a military. What did the people done before . Guest farming. Tobacco fields are nearby. Host thats got to be a decline industry, right . Guest i would hope so. But yeah, its this rural area and then they have this hightech, its kind of an incredible process of getting this superstrong glass made in this secret plant in kentucky. Host steve jobs, you came. At one point to alexander gram bell or thomas edison. How so . Guest well, both were, you know, all three of those men were incredible innovators could but there also incredible self promoters and they were incredible marketers give one of my favorite stories about belt one of the most useful story to know is that before the telephone took off he had to sell this thing picky basically, people regard it as this, this toy, and he would come to conventions and he would do demonstrations and he would start kind of giving like jobs like lectures about what it could do and present this stuff. And slowly but surely people that interested. He was selling it. He was doing these tech demos which are part of apples mythology building machine, these demos are really, i have a chapter that talks about that, too. The same with edison. Edison was a smart guy, great inventor, but he was host to a giant team, not, whose names are all but lost to history to most people, other than historians of technology and the like, but the people that really sort of did the brutal work, the trial and error, getting the exact filament to work in his life will be forking out. The light bulb is actually a lot like the iphone. They were light bulbs on the market with edison came out with his. They just were not that great yet. What edison did is he found the perfect combination of the glow that would broadcast this life it anybody like that was pleasing with like in easeofuse and sort of longevity. So turn it into a useful product that he wasnt the first. He wasnt necessarily the one who invented a patent for help lightbulb technology works, but introduce it to the masses thanks to a large team working behind. Thats largely invisible, much like the iphone teamwork behind steve jobs. Host when you come out on the nature of the creative process, as it played out with an apple, because you have come somebody, a project can be destroyed amongst the work can be done to been on steve jobs when of the day. The other aspect as you mentioned, opening up so you could have skunk work projects at the time they worked the wealthy companies they became. These are people you kind of comment and there was this constant, your different battles, two different approaches to all of this. It played out. It was a meritocracy at the end. Personnel didnt matter. Give me a sense of how this played out because its a long story understand but where do you come out on this process . Guest one of the interesting things was when i started researching it, 18 begin to help quickly that it is all about collaboration and to some extent competition and teams of people trying ideas and working on them together and developing them, and that really the role of like a steve jobs today would be sort of a little tangential and maybe not even necessary ultimately. But then by the end that is an interesting element at play with somebody who can wield the sword of mythology and the social capital that steve jobs had within this company is being a powerful decider, the ultimate person who could take what was still even though not as big as it was as it is now but it was a Large Company and bike this is what were going to do. Host persistent focused, and not giving up on it. As you write in late 2000 for comes and okay, its going to be a phone and its going to be a touchscreen. And were going to make it happen. Theres back and forth after that. Thats basically the direction, and thats what, getting the big stuff right. Guest to his immense credit he did get right when it mattered and he listened to his lieutenants when it mattered, and he recognized the genius of what these guys did, and he was able to elevate it when it mattered. So i really, you need both. I would come dunmore on the side of the teams because these guys, its hard, it really is hard in hindsight because it worked, this process, however it came round, however steve jobs made the calls and over his teammate this incredible technology, it could what i argue is the most successful product of all times. So this blueprint host generation up from the bottom of the team and top that are not as case may be. When we had iphone when we had the iphone with steve jobs . Guest theres a chance we might have Something Like it. I dont know if we wouldve gotten as soon or if it would be as good or if it would be as satisfying for a full be as big a deal. It might have been something that was like slowly iterated into existence by various competitors pick it might be something that we might have had a little blackboard buttons longer. Whos to say . Its really hard to say here what is there to say is that he made the right calls when the mattered and he was able to sort of galvanize these troops who really loved and were in awe of working for him. So we did push them to sort of make the best thing that they could. Host do you have a a favorite sort of unsung hero characters in this . Theres plenty of candidates pick you mentioned, someone who calls the linen and mccarthy of user face. There are others that played roles, tony played some role and the didnt and then they shared responsibilities. Do you have a favorite character, monkeys unsung heroes, someone would not even know the name of, and represented character that had the right stuff . Guest Wayne Westerman to attach on earlier is a great example of that. He still at the company and that chapter was important other reason, and yet this design team. But he knows johnny, he designed these beautiful industrial shapes and revolutionize the way we come what we expect from our consumer electronic products. But what happened on the screen is just as important and nobody really knows the names of these human interface designers. That whole team ites it is a really, isnt unsung team. Maybe one of the greatest sort of design teams in technology over the last 20 years. Great christie, and other guys of the team, freddie, this whole team was really, really instrumental. And yet its engineers who also deserve a huge amount of credit, richard williamson, the guy who was responsible for safar and then taking safari and squeezing it down satisfying on a phone. The list does go on and on, but yeah, and josh, this guy from mit, brian have become the input engineers who hacked together these early prototypes. Id say theres a dozen or so people who really i try to share their stories and give them sort of the due credit for the role in this process. Host how many are still there . Guest just a couple. Almost all the people who worked on the iphone project, the majority of them have left apple for various reasons. Burnedout, new challenges, but what interesting things to note is besides scott who led sort of, who was the vp of the Iphone Software effort, who left, who has, you know, believed to be fired after the map screwup and for a number of inner apple executive headbutting reasons, he was, aside from him no one was elevated to the executive ranks that worked on the iphone really. Besides johnny who was there and always responsible for design stuff. The people who really were responsible for apples of biggest product, you know, tony was a vp for a while but he left. Scott. Its interesting that you dont see a lot of those names there. Host lets talk about the future in apple, which you touch on in the book. Artificial intelligence is where everybody is sort of focus, a great chapter built around tom who was the guy, cofounder of scenery. This was a project that the pentagon had funded much before, and then apple bought it, but this is, siri is apples flavor of we have google working on, amazon has got it. Microsoft has it. Ibm has it in terms of water for individual industry professions. Its a clever assistant in some way, shape, or form. Theres a great debate as this evolves as to whether apples close culture hurts it or not in this for the development but tom gruber is still there and you talk to him on a phone outside papua new guinea. So tells the apples take on a eye with tom gruber. Guest its easy to kind of forget now with the age of alexa and the google assistance of you talking about, that apple was kind of first to this arena. Siri was the first sort of mainstream ai digital assistant. And the emphasis was always kind of on that service, the service element. The interesting to me about that interview and about hearing about their approach was sort of the effort more to make siri sort of relatable and to be a character come someone that you want to interact with and apples criticized the private is functionality fall behind the rest. For a long time it was relegated to this novelty status where it was not always giving you the right answers to stuff. Theyve really tried to beat it up in recent years and do things like, the approach we are doing this huge amounts of machine learning, that wasnt what siri originally was. It was a really sort of basically a really complex database full of, you would Voice Recognition over faqs. The point where it would be useful all the time. I mean people do use it all the time. With memos and get directions real quick. And now theyre pushing it forced by competition but you know, my take on that something was i think the jury is really still out on that. How much we really want a personal assistant on our phones all the time. How much, lets is interesting because you can have it turn on music or order toilet paper when youre out of it. But in terms of like a device that we want to talk to, i think the cases are more limited. Do we really want to be public talking to our phones in any scenario . A lot of people do [laughter] but how far does that go . It will be interesting to see. It is a big money mess. It is one of those things i feel like could break in any direction. And they have narrow networks, it becomes possible because we kind of they learn as they go. It is easy to talk about it you know is much more difficult to make it happen. They recently did lift the veil and they started to allow researchers to publish which is something that huge a huge difference. They said apple wasnt getting the best people and apple has not allowed that in its lab at all. Really in the past so that was kind of a big push and again, feature is wide open. A lot of people think that it is correct that wall. I think there is a question whether the device matters as much . I mean to amazon they have taken the approach because they put it around the device. Google i mean you know Android Devices but its also important that is, apple and the iphone future. Where is it headed . I mean there are a lot of different ways to think about that and we have seen some questions from apple to try and expand its services. Expanded the obscure and emphasize apple music in his recognizing the need to find new sources of revenue. That said, sales from the iphone, just like [inaudible] i think i misspoke. It is all coming from the iphone. I have had a shrinking mac which by the way, if you put this in perspective you know, the amount of money, the amount yearly that hollywood takes in his essay. Vanessa the iphone it looks like just a little tiny slice of pie. Total revenue. Yes. So it takes a cut of 30 percent of every oxo. But also it takes a lot to maintain the infrastructure, the servers, vetting the ops you know the whole, so how much profit is actually making is another question altogether. But apple is a real motivation to kind of maintain the status quo and to keep making you know better phones, welldesigned phone, more expensive phones maybe . There is rumors of a 1000 plus iphone eight timing this fall which is hundreds of dollars more than you know so, i think as much as apple has seen the hub of innovation and is much as it is gone to stall out on the tim cooks tenure, it really has this motivation to milk its cash cow and that is what companies do when they get to this size and establish product lines that are so successful. So reliable. I think the iphone, the basic shape of the iphone and the model is tightly integrating the software and the shape is here to stay for a while. I wouldnt be surprised if in 10 years we still have something that looks very much like the iphone that we have in our pockets now. Thank you brian. Thank you so much. See stan, where history unfold daily. In 1979 cspan was created as a Public Service by americas Cable Television companies. And is brought to you today by your cable or satellite provider. On booktv today we have on the campus of ucla in los angeles. Were talking with professors who are also authors, Brenda Stevenson teaches history here at ucla, for Spencer Stevenson what courses do you teach . Courses on slavery and womens history also interracial dynamics. How long have you been at ucla . The six years. How has it changed . Tremendously it has grown the student population, it has grown t