Its meaning, and ive always liked to write about real people who are in a situation whether it be averill hairman after world war ii and you have a create a new world ordinary like nato and the world bank and the Marshall Plan 0 steve jobs who says were now in a digital revolution, we have to make it personal. These are people who to use steve jobs words, were able to think different, think out of the box. I want to try to explore the creative mind and how it works. Host one of them themes themes in your book seems to be a connect to spirituality. Guest everybody believed they were part of something larger than themselves. I remember sitting with steve jobs and i asked him why did you do what you do . And he said, life is like a river. You get to pick things out of the river, really cool things people have done, they put before you in the river, great devices or great ideas, but after a while you realize its not how much you get to take out of the river its what you put back into the river, what you leave behind so that your spirit is still manifest after you have been gone and whether its Albert Einstein or Benjamin Franklin or anybody else, they did have a connection to something super natural, something somewhat larger than themselves. Host from 2011 your book on steve jobs, opening sentence. In the early summer of 204 i got a phone call from steve jobs. Guest uhhuh. Host why did he call you . Guest i had written a biography of Benjamin Franklin, and he asked me to do him next. I thought, ben franklin Albert Einstein, then you . Then i realize he had been sick and fighting cancer, and we dont always look at Creative Minds in business and entrepreneurship, and to me to be able to get very close to and try to peel back the layers from the greatest business and Technology Innovator of our day and generation, was going to be something truly special. Id known him since around 1984 when he came to Time Magazine toy toy to show off the original macintosh, and we had remained moderately good friends, especially when i was editing time and he used me to market. I liked stop jones and his passion. When i got his call i thought is was special. Host i asked jobs why he wanted me to be the one to write his biography. I think youre good at getting people to talk he says. Guest he was he was somebody 0 who understood the power of listening and i learn that from him a little bit too. Because when i started working with him, id ask a whole lot of questions, and sometimes id have all sorts of premising then i realize it if i just let him go just say ipod and he would go on for on hour or two i do really listen and try to pick up the rhythms of the way his mind worked. So im not necessarily the best academic historian, and may not even been the best reporter when it comes to writing books but im pretty good at just getting people to be willing to talk to me and i hope thats because i try to listen. And im lucky. Having been at Time Magazine or cnn, if call up and ask to speak to larry page im more likely to be able to get through. So i should go visit gordon moore, moores law, and hi laws and spend time with wozniak because i have been blessed too having access to these people. So thats what i try bring to the party. There will be people who take the steve jobs book of the innovators book, and do a better analysis what does this mean hough does this lead to leadership lessons. For me, what i do is i can call people up, sit down listen, try to get the quotes right and put it there as if its a first draft for other people who might be able to analyze things from the book. Host is this book an authorized biography, steve jobs. Guest not in the technical sense of the term. When steve and i talked he kept saying, i dont want to read the book first. Because he said to me, one of the things that made steve jobs what he was, he was brutally honest. He said ive always tried to be brutally honest and i want you to be brutally honest, and it will be hard. He said, im not going to ask to read the book before it comes out. Im not going to have any say over whether you use an anecdote or not. He said ill read it six months after it comes out. Thats why summer of 2011, after he stepped down from apple we as ceo of apple, we discussed, when should the book come out . He said lets make it i think you should make the last scene when i step down as ceo of apple. And so i did and the book went to the printers and i was hoping, hoping he would be alive when the book came out. In fact he told me, the last time we talked every turned the book in in he said i prom mitted you i wouldnt read it when it came out but ill read it in six months. And this was in late august, and that made me feel good. I thought okay hell beat the cancer one more time and live another half year or maybe two years, but then, of course we were not so lucky. Host he has no idea. Guest i did sit with him and read parts of the book to him especially the last chapter, the last chapter is where i take a lot of things he told me and i bring it together and let him have the last word for four or five pages in the book, where from different interviews i took his thoughts, his broad thoughts about why he did what he did what was the meaning of life for him. So i put those together and put them together from two or three separate formal interviews i had had, and i wanted to read it outloud to him just to make sure he was comfortable with it. I also theres some things in the book where he is personal or tough on people or anecdotes im not sure you or i would want in books, and i made sure he know about each one of those. Especially ones where i thought he might want to like where he doesnt give somebody Stock Options or is mean to somebody or whatever. I wanted to let him explain his side of it. So anything in the book that i felt might be a little tough, that he wouldnt like i made sure he knew about it before hand because that was the way steve jobs was. He didnt try to sugar coat things. Im not as brave as courageous as steve was but i learned from him. So the last few interviews with him, id go over things in the book i thought he would not like. Host and if grew to the index and under steve jobs, you find mood swings of. Offensive behavior of, and theres five lines of pages where offensive behavior of is in there, and a couple other things prankster, primal scream therapy. Guest well, that was something that i was as i said felt very fortunate that he let me get very up close to talk about things like his primal scream therapy, or talk about examples where he was really tough on people and he encouraged me to be honest about it and we would talk about those things. So in some ways i felt by the end of the process i knew more about him than i knew about myself. He was a very selfreflective individual. He understood himself extraordinarily well, and he was very willing to talk about it, and fortunately for me repeatedly he encouraged me just put it all in. Every now and then id say there were a few thinks i left out, just thought, unnecessarily painful to some other people, and didnt really give you much of an insight on steve and side go over with my wife and say that story should be left out. That will actually hurt this person and wont help the reader that much. But every time id ask him, heed say, put it in whether its about his previous girlfriend, whether it was about the daughter he had before he got married. All of these things, i said he said, told you put those things in. Host was he smart you write . No not exceptionally. Instead he was guest i compare him and contrast him to an absolutely wonderful smart guy of course bill gates, and bill gates had more of what you call conventional mental Processing Power. I marvel and watch bill gates take large amounts of information, sometimes two screens on his desk screens would have four windows on them and hed be processing the information, and just be absolutely brilliant. Steve was not brilliant in that way. He did not have that analytical Processing Power. He had an intuitive genius. He could have a feel for things. A feel for what people would like. A feel for beauty. A feel for what would work. And so to me, thats what i meant by genius. Like in Albert Einstein, which is Albert Einstein was not the best physicist in europe in 1905. In fact he was a third class patent examiner in the Swiss Patent Office because he couldnt get his ph. D. They kept rejecting his thesis. Cooperate get a job at a university. So you wouldnt say oh, he is by conventional standards the greatest physicist mind of 1905. But he was the greatest genius. He was able to make imaginative and intuitive leaps. I would never put nor has steve jobs every put steve in the same quan tim orbit as Albert Einstein, but there was a similarity, which is that the genius of steve jobs came from making intuitive leaps. Imaginative leaps. Questioning received wisdom and thats what ben franklin did that what steve jobs did, that what Albert Einstein did question the received wisdom of a newton, righting at the beginning, that time marches along, second by second irrespective of how we observe it. You get this patent clerk, Albert Einstein. How do we test that, take two clocks and synchronize them . Likewise with steve jobs, he peep didnt know we needed a thousand songs in our pocket. We had walkmen, mp3 players a big part of our life but steve was able to have a feel for beauty and a feel for Customer Experience that to me made him the greatest intuitive genius of the digital age and thats what i meant by that sentence. Host Walter Isaacson, there is one aspect of steve jobs had a role in with this book and that was the cover. We have a couple of different covers and the original well show on the air and then show you the paperback cover as well. What was his concern about the cover . Guest well, when i first did a cover, was with Simon Schuster and it was an apple and steve in it. Just the test cover they were doing. And once he got mad, he got very mad. I was on the way to seem him, landed at the San Francisco airport, took out my iphone there was a thing you least want to see, which is seven missed phone calls from steve jobs. I said uhoh, something i actually was worried. I thought maybe something happened. So i hit return phone call. Answered instantly and he starts this reaming me out yelling at me saying, you have no taste. I thought i had no idea what he was talking about. I kept saying kept trying to interject, tell me what youre upset about he said that cover. And i didnt even know what he was talking about. Apparently the cover that Simon Schuster put it in online catalogues. He said that was ugly. Im not going to cooperate with you anymore because youre going to put an ugly cover on the book. I said i hadnt thought about the cover yet. The book is not finish. He said unless you agree to let me have some input in the cover im not going to cooperate anymore. That was the easiest decision to make. Within a half second i said, great, help me help suggest a better cover. He said, black and white, make it simple. We went through a lot of photographs. I loved the Albert Watson photograph that ended up on the cover host the old steve jobs. Guest the older steve jobs the one with his probably have it on the screen now and that is Albert Watson, one of the great favreers. At Time Magazine i worked with Albert Watson, he did that for Fortune Magazine but there were four or five pictures he what considering. I hoped we could agree on the Albert Watson picture, and we did. Then he just wasnt that hell vet tick helvetica type. No curly cues or doodads on it. He said i like heltica. Steve loves font. Thats why in the macintosh its a bitmap display with fontses. Thats why we have beautiful computers. To steve it made a difference. Benjamin franklin liked it. He brought franklin bold and stuff, those type of fontses, they do a lot of them were based on helvetica. The only thing that i pushed back on is he wanted my name in dark type and his name in light gray thinking that it was my book and my name should i said no, no this isnt has nothing to do with me. This book is all about you. You cooperated. Every word in there is something built on something you said and so i wanted steve jobs to be the darker type and me to be more recesssive and thats how i turned out. But there was maybe eight or nine conversations, and with his own artistic directors and great people at apple, design directors, making sure that the cover that looks so, so simple Pretty Simple looking cover, took a lot of work. Sometimes simplicity is the ultimate sophistication and sometimes simplicity is difficult, because as steve jobs said and is a his great design directors often said, simplicity isnt about just making things easy or taking things out. You have to understand the depth of something. You have to truly dig deep and go hard. Its hard work to create simplicity. So leave out something. And that is what steve jobs was able to do on the ipod on the iphone, the ipad the original macintosh, and he pushed to make sure it was done on the cover. That was his genius. Why the younger steve jobs on the paperback. Guest by the time the the hardback had been out for a year. The Albert Watson photograph was iconic Apple Computer used it on their posters. It was used in the memorial services. It had just become the standard iconic photograph. I think there were people, both at apple and Simon Schuster who said dont keep building on that one. Try something i also saw the picture i think it was done for Rolling Stone in the early 1980s, in which steve is in the exact same pose. You have it there. On the paperback and i thought, well this will just be something fresh and new. Steve always used the phrase, think different, and i think whether it was Albert Watson or apple or Simon Schuster everybody felt it wouldnt be thinking different if we used that, and i think apple felt rightly, took that the iconic and classic image was something they owned and i wanted to make sure that with the paperback i think they asked, too that we tried to think different. Host what was the importance of lorraine powell. Guest somebody who was important to steve. He somebody who deeply steve jobs, and i think he would say to me that his life wouldnt have been the same having not met her, and had she not helped make him who he was. So by the way the whole family. Unlike a lot of powerful people he wasnt out on the circuit every day. He wasnt having dinner every night with famous people. He was having dinner at the long table in the kitchen of his house, with his three kids that he and maureen had, wonderful kids and he would talk, deep serious conversation. No playing on the iphone or ipad during dinner. So as a family man, steve was sometimes rough around the edges, whether it was at home or the office or work or whatever but the one thing you discover is that even though he was rough around the edges, at work he developed a team of people who were deeply loyal to him, and more than just loyal, they loved him. And likewise at home. He has around him a family who deeply is not only loyal to him but deeply loves him. And so when people say steve jobs was a rough character at times, he had an abrasive personality at times. He could be mean to people sometimes. I think yes. But i hope you look at what happened is that he is able to have deep love and deep loyalty at home and at the office therefore put it into a context. Some people who are mean and nasty and everybody hates them. So steve had something else. It wasnt just like he was sometimes hard to deal with. He really connected to people. He inspired them. He made them love him. And that is the essence of steve jobs. Every now and then ill read articles about bosses who try to be like steve jobs and try to be tough, or people who try to be like steve jobs and be brutally honest. I think yes but dont try it because steve could pull it off because deep inside he knew how to connect with people. He knew how to make them feel inspired. He really cared deeply about other people. Otherwise he wouldnt have known how to make such products that connected emotionally to us and so when you talk about his home life, just as you talk about his office life, there were people around him his wife his kids who truly felt a deep, deep passionate appreciation and love for him and so it was more complex than some people make it out. I wish i had conveyed that better in the book. Some people read the book and say he was kind of mean. I say wait wait, wait. I tried over and over again to say in the book yes he was tough on people, but whether it was the original macintosh team or his family, people would give up anything in the world just to make sure i would have the opportunity to work with him to be with him. To be around him. Host in the introduction to your book the inmotivators you write, as an electronic geek who loved kits and ham raid wyoming you give your ham radio address guest john thomas peter. July yet tang go papa. Im old enough to have gotten my first geek experiences soldering circuits for a ham radio and getting to play with a ham radio. Host i can remember when vacuum tubes gave way to transition temperatures. You say historians are wary about calling periods of great change revolutions would because the look at progress as revolutionary. Guest were in a revolution like the Industrial Revolution, where in the Industrial Revolution you have the steam engine that connects with mechanical processes like looms and weaving machines or whatever. And suddenly we move into an Industrial Age where machines and people are ha