it might just change the way you look at his legend. >> your time is limited. don't waste it living someone else's life. >> and top chef from a tiny italian joint downtown to a global food empire and tv career. mario batali will dish on his past and competition and own waistline. this is "piers morgan tonight." walter isaacson author of the biography steve jobs. walter, welcome. >> good to be here. >> a real firestorm. top of the charts. it's selling like hot cakes. it's causing huge debate. you would expect all that because steve jobs is one of the great american business icons in history. it's a fascinating book. when i plucked out some of the adjectives you use to describe him, obnoxious, rude, ruthless, i'm not surprised. nothing i know about steve jobs surprises me that he would be all of those things. i would add and i'm sure you would, brilliant, genius. >> absolutely. >> can you be a genius without being all these things? >> i used to work for ted turner and every one of those adjectives applied to him. but he was able to create something totally new. with steve, every person i talked to and those who loved him the most and worked with him closest, they would tell you the steve story. about the time he bit their head off. i would try really hard in the book to make sure everybody understands that that was -- if you are wearing velvet gloves, it's hard to make a dent in the universe. he got people to do things they never thought they could do by inspiring them and sometimes berating them but i think people understood it of him. >> he came to you a number of years ago. some thought at the time very arrogantly. you've done einstein, kissinger. i want you to do my book. you didn't know he was sick with cancer although he did. it would have been presumptuous maybe. you're not even in your 40s. what was your reaction when he first came to you? >> precisely that. i said, hey, you're my age. in 20 years or 30 years or so i would love to do a biography. he was in an up and down career. it wasn't really until 2009 that i figured out and his wife told me, okay, you ought to do it now. that's when he had just had his liver transplant. of course being steve the minute i said, yes, i would love to do it, i think he had trepidations and second thoughts so we spent a lot of 2009 going back and forth. >> a fascinating time to sit down with a man who probably knew he was dying. this man who has got very bad pancreatic cancer trying a few things. interesting in the book when you say he tried too many alternative treatments and probably could have saved himself if he hadn't done that. but typical of the man i would guess. >> i'm not sure he would have saved himself. very typical of the man. there's two sides of steve jobs. this rebel counterculture child of the hippy period and he's always trying alternative new things but also the scientific technological geek. so he's doing the most advanced forms of medicine. he's studying both of these as he decides how to treat himself. i think that he never really thought, i don't think, that cancer would catch him up until almost the end he thought he would stay as he put it one lilly pad ahead of the cancer. he was doing targeted therapy. it was based on gene sequencing. every time the cancer would mutate he would find a new way to stop it. even though he was facing his mortality and even before he had cancer he used to talk about life being an arc. you are born and you die. i think that magical optimistic thinking he had up until the end he thought he would beat the cancer. >> you had a remarkable amount of time with him. over 40 interviews you did with steve jobs which is more time than anybody has had i would imagine with that brain outside of his immediate family, closest friends. the obvious questions to me when i finished the book is did you like him? >> i did. >> was he likable? >> he was compelling and likable because when you first meet him, you're afraid. you heard all of the tales. i saw it every now and then. i would walk around with him whether in a restaurant or a hotel or in a group of people and he would if somebody said something stupid instead of saying i'm not sure i agree with you, he would say that's the stupidest blank, blank, blank idea i ever heard. you would be a little taken aback. >> you saw him do that. this is where i have a problem with the way that he was. i always thought you can judge people in two caps. those who are polite to waitresses and those who are rude to waitresses. i think you tell a story of how you've seen him be rude to waitresses. a man of his power and wealth to be rude to a waitress serving a table to me hard to like that kind of person. admire and salute him and all of the rest of it but likable? >> well, you know, there are certain types of behavior you don't like. after a while you talk to him and he said that woman didn't want to be doing that job in that way or whatever and he just rationalizes it. i think that if you want to judge everybody by their politeness, you would find a whole bunch of nice clubbable friends but you wouldn't find a lot of geniuses in the mix. >> was he driven by perfectionism? is that what it was all about? >> i think he had an artistic sensibility. just like a picasso or a bob dylan or whatever it may be. driven by the power of perfection and almost poetic sensibility. as i said a moment ago, there's that sort of emotional sentimental romantic side of him and there's a hardcore business side of him and i think he was driven by connecting the two. whatever he did, even when it came to being tough on the people around him, that instilled such a loyalty and passion that, you know, it was a bonding thing. he said that's the price of admission for being in the room. i get to say you're full of it, you say i'm full it and we -- we create the best team. >> i get that. i worked for rupert murdoch. when you work for these people, yes, they're all those adjectives that i read out earlier about steve jobs. but they are charismatic because of who they are and often very inspiring because they tend to work harder than anybody else. they are driven. they are creative. they take risks. they are gamblers. all things that most people would like to be but tend not to be. >> you just described steve jobs perfectly. a risk taker. a gambler. charismatic. compelling. >> control freak. didn't he even choose his own cover? >> the one time i really got chewed out is because he said i'll have no control over this book. i'm not going to read it. i don't want it to feel like an in-house book. you can put things in there i won't like but that's good because it's not going to feel like commissioned in-house book but then there was a cover design that the publisher put out in the catalog. he looked at it the and said in short, snippy words, it was the worst thing he had ever seen and he had merit to it. after yelling at me for a while holding the phone like this, he says i won't keep cooperating unless you allow me to have input into the cover. i thought for maybe one second or maybe 1.5 seconds, sure. a guy with a great design eye. i saw that sort of artistic passion. >> he's a very clean apple style cover. you were designing a book cover for the boss of apple, it would be that. >> i will not show you the one we designed before then. it just shows how bad we were in that design. >> he was right? >> yeah. >> i like that cover. it instantly grabs. >> it's like an apple product. >> simple and clean and fascinating. >> you know johnny, the wonderful guy from britain and he says the drive toward simplicity means you have to understand the depths of something. you can't remove a lot of buttons and then it becomes simple. that was the essence of the steve jobs design sensibility. >> in reading the book, it doesn't sound like he was the world's best engineer. it sounds to me -- i felt this strongly when he died and he was this great engineer, actually, his genius partly was marketing. this is one of the great marketeers i have ever seen. you knew that he left things off that everyone would want but wouldn't desperately need immediately but know the moment he put them on the next version of that model they would rush out and buy that too. that's brilliant marketing. it's manipulative and cynical. >> you had waz on the show a couple nights ago. steve said, he's 50 times better than any engineer that steve has ever met, steve jobs ever met. he said he could do meetings in his head. they are young kids. steve is -- wozniak has created a blue box that allows you to rip off the phone company by making long distance calls. steve jobs said i can put a case around it and market it. when waz comes up with the circuit board, it's a brilliant design using the microprocessors and juicing them up to do great things. it's jobs who says we're getting a case for it. get a power supply. >> it's not a brilliant design, a brilliant piece of engineering. it's like all of these greats things where either you have one or the other, they would never be as great as the sum of both parts. >> there's a part in the book i love and a moment i had with steve in his living room where they are listening to the bootleg tapes he had of strawberry fields being created. john lennon is doing it and mccartney is working on it with him. i don't know if you've ever heard it. there are 15 different takes they do. they would hit a wrong cord and they would rewind and steve would say that's exactly like i love doing at apple and with waz and with the people who are always fighting which we almost have it done and we rewind and make it more perfect. i think waz and steve were that way. lennon and mccartney were that way. >> fascinating. we're go on a break. we'll come back and talk about what i think drives steve jobs throughout his life and that's his extraordinary upbringing. abandoned as a young man and then what happens next in the search for his real parents. a gripping part of his life i think. the employee of the month is... spark card from capital one. spark cash gives me the most rewards of any small business credit card. it's hard for my crew to keep up with 2% cash back on every purchase, every day. 2% cash back. that's setting the bar pretty high. thanks to spark, owning my own business has never been more rewarding. 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[ chorus ] ♪ we are farmers bum-ba-dum, ba-bum-bum-bum ♪ will be giving away passafree copies of the alcoholism & addiction cure. to get yours, go to ssagesmalibubook.com. >> today for the first time ever i would like to let macintosh speak for itself. >> hello. i'm macintosh. it sure is great to get out of that bag. >> steve jobs in 1984 unveiling the first macintosh computer. he looked so dashing there. that was part of his appeal. i remember that launch and feeling so excited because there was a showman. this man was not your conventional geek. >> he choreographed everything about that everything from the lighting to the poor macintosh team that staggered across the finish line just a couple weeks earlier to get the coding done and now we have to do the launch to make macintosh speak. i think that one of the things he sort of invented among the 20,000 others was that notion of the product launch where the clouds part, the light shines down and the crowd sings "hallelujah." >> it was like michael jackson doing a show only for computers. making it an event and making it exciting and building hype and marketing it and promoting it. all these things he was brilliant at. what i want to get to with him is how much of this was driven by the fact that he was abandoned at birth. he was given away by his real parents. just reading the book it becomes a kind of surging crusade for him to try to find his real parents. tell me about that. >> i remember walking in his old neighborhood showing me the house is when he was 6 or 7 years old. i went across the street and sat on this lawn and lisa who lived across the street said to me you have been adopted. that means your real parents didn't want you. you were abandoned. he said i ran back into my house and i saw my parents and i was crying. the salt of the earth couple that adopted him. he asked about that. they said no, we specifically picked you out. you were chosen. i think he says to me that part of growing up wasn't just feeling a little bit of a hole like do i fit here because i wasn't born into this but feeling chosen and special. i think there was always a little bit of a hole in him. he would tell his college friends. he would tell his friends in the early days of apple i feel something is missing in me. i think that's why he finally does go on a quest to find his birth mother. >> he tries to find his mother and is successful. tell me about that. >> he finally gives up after he hired a detective and couldn't find the mother. he sees on his birth certificate the name of a doctor in san francisco. he calls the doctor that sheltered unwed mothers including steve jobs' 25, 30 years earlier and the doctor says all my records were destroyed. i can't tell you who your mother was but that's not true. the doctor was lying and that night the doctor wrote a letter and said to be delivered to steve jobs upon my death. and then the doctor died pretty soon thereafter. it was coincidental. the letter comes to steve and says here's your mother. he tracks her down in los angeles. she says you have a sister in new york. it's one of these tales that nobody could have written. >> what is even more extraordinary, i think, is when he begins the search for his father and in the end he never actually has anything to do with his father but it turns out by a freakish coincidence that he's met his real father. >> you couldn't make this up. >> the father was like, whoa, i met steve jobs without knowing steve jobs is his son. tell me about that. >> his sister, mona simpson, he meets is an artist like him. a great novelist and loves that she's an artist. she says we have to go on the quest to find the lost father. he's not all that interested but she's able to track down the father who had been born in syria, a graduate student at the university of wisconsin and in one of the weird coincidences of the world moved to california and so there he is running a coffee shop in sacramento. mona goes to see him and steve says don't tell him anything about me. i don't want to have anything to do with this guy who abandoned you and your mother. he says i wish you could have seen me earlier when i ran one of the great restaurants. a big restaurant near cupertino. everyone used to come there. even steve jobs. mona simpson is taken aback. she doesn't say anything. she doesn't say, steve jobs is your son. and he looks at how shocked she is. he said, yeah, he used to come, he was a big tipper. mona goes back and tells steve and steve says that balding syrian guy, that was my father? forget it. i don't ever want to see him. >> amazing story. >> you couldn't make it up. >> did they have any type of contact at all even at the point when steve was publicly dying? >> no. i think that -- i heard that he said that he sent text messages but no. there was no contact. >> what do you think that did to steve jobs? he obviously had this huge curiosity about his real parents but did he feel great anger do you think towards his father in particular? >> i don't think he felt anger toward his father. he didn't want anything to do with the guy who abandoned the family and mona. i think he was very deeply connected to his -- what he called his real parents. parents who adopted him. he didn't want to hurt them. paul jobs is a guy who was an auto mechanic and had taught steve all of the lessons of design and how to be a good craftsman and realized that steve was special and treated him as special even when he was a kid when steve didn't want to keep going to the same school, they scraped all their money together to buy a home in a better school district. they just went out of their way to make him feel chosen and special. >> i don't think surprisingly necessarily but certainly it was ironic that steve himself has a girlfriend. he makes her pregnant and then he abandons the daughter. >> 23 years old. same age as his father. >> does exactly what his father did. >> i asked him about it. he said, when it hit me, what a coincidence. steve of course takes responsibility for his daughter after a while. >> ten years. >> after the paternity test he then pays for her schooling and upbringing and in the first ten years he's not that close to her but she's a spunky good kid. smart kid. good writer. and by the time she's 8 or 9 or 10 years old they form more of a bond. she moves into his house for the high school years. so like any narrative tale, especially one that you couldn't make up, there's an arc to it and the people steve had trouble with eventually they all bond with him and certainly in her life she and all four of his children were very bonded to him. >> we'll come back and talk about the genius of apple as an institution in america. the part that he played really in making us all think differently. 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[ male announcer ] take action. take advil®. anat aviva, we wonder why other life insurance companies treat you like a policy, not a person. instead of getting to know you they simply assign you a number. aviva is here to change all that. we're bringing humanity back to insurance and putting people before policies. aviva life insurance and annuities. we are building insurance around you. i'm going to show you the back first because i'm in love with it. stainless steel. it's really, really durable. it's beautiful. and this is what the front of it looks like. boom. that's ipod. i have one in my pocket as a matter of fact. there it is right there. >> steve jobs introduction of the ipod ten years ago. another amazing moment in apple's history. apple became the second biggest company in the entire world. it became a company that was global in both its brand in terms of power and influence and he really did teach the world to think differently, didn't he? >> the amazing thing about the ipod is here's a personal computer company. it had finally clawed its way back with beautiful design of the imac and macbook pro and he discovers now we have to think different again. we're going to do devices that will make your computer sort of the hub of your digital lifestyle but it will be for music and then phone and everything else. so he takes apple during