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 r great devices or great ideas but after a while you realize it is not how much you take out of the river but how much you put into the river, what you leave behind so your spirit is so manifest after you have been gone. Whether it is Robert Einstein or Benjamin Franklin or anybody else they did have a connection to something supernatural, something larger than themselves. Host from 2011 to your book and steve jobs, the opening sentence in your the 2004 got a phone call from steve jobs. Why did he call you . I had written a biography of Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein and his it why do you do me next . My first reaction was okay, Benjamin FranklinAlbert Einstein, you . Then i realized he had been sick fighting cancer and we dont always look at Creative Minds in business and entrepreneurship. To be able to get very close to and peel back the layers on the greatest business and Technology Innovator of our generation was going to be something truly special. I had known him since 1984 when he came to Time Magazine to show off the original macintosh and we remained moderately good friends off and on especially when i was editing time and he had something he wanted on the cover of time and he told me how often the product was so i really like steve jobs and i liked his passion and when he gave me a call i realized this was something special, to get close to a real genius. Host i asked him why you wanted me to write his biography, you are good at getting people to talk. Guest he was somebody who understood the power of listening and i think i learned that from him a little bit too because when i started working with him i would ask a whole lot of questions and sometimes they would have promises and finally realized if i just let him go, he would go on for an hour or two, i could really listen and try to pick up the rhythms of the way his mind worked. I am not necessarily the best academic historian. I may not be the best reporter when it comes to writing books, but i am pretty good at getting people to be willing to talk to me and i hope that is because i try to listen and i am lucky. Having been at Time Magazine or cnn if i, and asked to speak to mary page i am more likely than the average person to get through so i feel i should try to do that report i should visit gordon more in his house spent time with steve bosnia corollary page because i have been blessed to have access to some of these people because i have been a journalist my whole life so that is what i try to bring to the party. There are people who take the steve jobs will or the the innovators book into a better analysis of what does this mean, how does this lead to leadership lessons but for me what id do is i can call people up sit down listen, try to get the quotes rights, as if it is the first draft for other people who might analyze things from the book. Host is this book steve jobs authorized . Guest not in the technical sense of that term. When we talked he kept saying i dont want to read the book first. He said to me that one of the things that made steve jobs what he was was that he was brutally honest. He said i always tried to be brutally honest and want you to be brutally honest and you will be hard, i wont ask to read the book before it comes out. I wont have any say in whether you use an anecdote or not. I will read it six months after it comes out. That is why summer of 2011 after he sat down with apple the ceo of apple, when did the book come out . You should make the last scene when i stepped down as ceo of apple so i did and the book went to the printers and i was hoping, hoping he was going to be alive when the book came out. He told me last time we talked after i turned the book in he said i promised you i wasnt going to read it when it came out but i will read it in six months later. This was in late august. That made me feel good he will beat the cancer one more time live another year or two years but of course we were not so lucky. Host he had 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 took a lot of things he told me and bring it together and let him have the last word, from different interviews and i took his thoughts those broad thoughts about why he did what he did what made him creative, what was the meaning of life for him so i put those together and put them together from three or four separate formal interviews i hadnt wanted to read it out loud to him just to make sure he was comfortable with it. Also did some things in the book where, personal or tough on people come anecdotes i am not sure you or i would want in books and i made sure he knew about each one of those especially ones where he might doesnt give anybody Stock Options or is mean to somebody 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 before hand because that was the way steve jobs was. She didnt try to sugarcoat things. If you thought you were not going to like something he would say at our right. That is hard for me to do. I am not as brave or courageous as steve was but ive learned from him so the last few interviews with the mic go over things in the book that i thought he would not like. Host if you go to the index and other steve jobs you find mood swings, a sense of behavior and five lines of pages where offensive behavior of is in fair and a couple other things, prankster primal scream therapy . As i say, felt very fortunate that he let me get very up close. Or examples where he was tough on people. He encouraged me to be honest and talk about those things. I knew more about him than i knew about myself. A very self reflective individual. He understood himself extraordinarily well and when he started peeling away the layers was very willing to talk about it and fortunately for me repeatedly encouraged me to put it in and there were a few things i left out, a few things that i thought were unnecessarily painful to some other people in sit and give you much insight on steve so i would go over him with my wife and say that story should be left out, that will hurt this president wont helps the reader that much but every time i would ask him he would they put it in whether it was about his girlfriend or the daughter he had before he got married. All these things, he said i told you, put those things in. Host was the smart . Not exceptionally. Instead, he was guest i compare and contrast to an absolutely wonderful smart guy, bill gates. Bill gates had conventional mental Processing Power. And watching bill gates take large amounts of information, two screens on his desk with full windows on them and processing the information and just be absolutely brilliant. Steve was not brilliant in that way. He didnt have that analytical Processing Power. What he had was an intuitive genius. He would have a feel for things, for what people would like, feel for beauty, feel for what would work and so to me that is what i meant by genius. I wrote about Albert Einstein, Albert Einstein was not the best physicist in europe in 1905. He was a third class patton examiner in the Swiss Patent Office because he couldnt even get his ph. D. They kept rejecting his thesis. She couldnt get a job and the university. So you wouldnt say 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 Norwood Steve jobs ever put steve in the same quantum orbit as Albert Einstein but there was a similarity, which is the genius of steve jobs came from making intuitive leaps, imaginative leaps questioning received wisdom. That is what Benjamin Franklin did, that is what Albert Einstein did, questions things you and i might say are obvious, question the received wisdom of new and, time marches along second by second in respect of of how we observed it. You get a patent court, Albert Einstein saying how do we know that . How would be test that . How do we take two clocks in synchronize them to test that . Likewise with steve jobs, you and i had walkman, we had m p 3 players, a big part of our lives that steve was able to have a feel for beauty and Customer Experience that made him the greatest intuitive genius of the digital age and that is what i meant by that sentence. Host there is one aspect steve jobs had a role in with this book and that was the cover. We have several different covers and the original we will show on the air and show you the paperback cover as well. What was his concern about the cover . When i first did a cover i was with simon and schuster and it was an apple with steve in it, just a test cover and when steve got mad he got very mad. I was on the way to see him, landed in the San Francisco airport, my iphone, the thing you least want to see, 7 missed phone calls from steve jobs, oh oh. I was worried the something happened, return phone call, he starts this reaming me out, yelling at me saying you have no taste. I had no idea what he was talking about. I kept trying to tell me what you are upset about. That cover. I didnt know what he was talking about. Apparently the cover simon and schuster put in an online catalog, the ugliest thing i have ever seen, i dont want to cooperate with you anymore because youre going to put an ugly cover on the book and i said i am sorry i hadnt thought about the cover yet. The book is not even finished and he said unless you agree to let me have some input on the cover i am not going to cooperate any more. That was the easiest decision i ever had to make. Within half a second vice a great, quote suggest a better cover. He said blackandwhite, make it simple. We went through a lot of photographs. I love the Albert Watson photograph the ended up on the cover the high back addiction, the one with you probably have an onscreen now, one of the great photographers at Time Magazine. I worked with robert watson. He did that for Fortune Magazine one of our sister publications, there were four five pictures he was considering including one time had done later i was hoping that we could agree on the Albert Watson picture and we did by the very end and he just wanted that helvetic a tight. If you look at it, it says steve jobs steve jobs by Walter Isaacson. It has no curlicues on it he said i like helvetic a. It is a very simple front. Steve loved foughts ever since he was at reed college. That is why in the mcintosh, the display with dozens of frauds you can use, we have beautiful computers. Those details mated difference. It is a bold font, Benjamin Franklin likes it. He bought franklin bolt and stuff, a lot of them were based on helvetic. He wanted my name in dark tight and his name in light gray, thinking it was my book and i said no. This has nothing to do with me. This is all about you, every word in there is built on something you said. I want to steve jobs in darker tight end me to be more recessive and that is the way it turned out. Eight or nine conversations, with his own artistic directors and great people at apple design directors making sure that coverage that looks so simple, Pretty Simple looking comfort took a lot of work, sometimes simplicity is the ultimate sophistication and sometimes simplicity is pretty difficult because as steve jobs said great design directors often said simplicity isnt about making things easier taking things up, you have to understand the depth of something. It is hard work to create simplicity, that is what steve jobs was able to do on the ipod, the iphone, the ipad, the original macintosh and he pushed to make sure it was done on the cover. Host why the younger steve jobs on the paperback . Wikipedia train guest by the time but hardback was out for a year, that photograph was iconic, Apple Computer had used on their posters, in the memorial services, it had become the standard iconic photographs. I think there were people at apple and simon and schuster, dont keep building on that, try something, i saw the picture for Rolling Stone in the yearly 1980s in which steve is in the exact same pose. You have on the paperback and i thought well, this will just be something fresh and new. The always used the phrase think different and whether it was Albert Watson or apple or simon and schuster, everybody felt it wouldnt be thinking different if we used that. I think apple fell rightly too that that iconoclastic image was something that they owned and i wanted to make sure with the paperback, we try to think different. Host was the important lorayne powell in steve jobss life . A person of deep moral character, somebody who helps kids from underserved neighborhoods get into college, somebody deeply deeply understood. Steve jobs. And i think he would say to me that his life wouldnt have been the same had he not met her and had she not helped make him who he was and by the way if all whole family. Unlike a lot of powerful people he wasnt out on the circuit everyday, 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, wonderful kids and he would talk, deep serious conversation. No playing on the i phone or ipad during dinner. As a family man steve was sometimes rough around the edges whether it was at home or the office or at work or whatever but one thing you will discover is even though he was a rough around the regis, at work he developed a team of people who were deeply loyal to him. More often just loyal, they loved him and likewise at home, he has around him a family who is deeply loyal to him and deeply loves him. So when people say steve jobs was a pretty rough character at times, he had an abrasive personality at times, he could be mean to people sometimes, yes, but i hope you look at what happens is he is able to have deep love and deep loyalty at home and at the office put it into context. Some people are mean and nasty and everybody hates them so steve had something else. Wasnt that he was sometimes hard to deal with, he really connected to people, he inspired them, he made some loved him. That to me is the essence of steve jobs. Every now and then i will read articles about bosses who tried to be like steve jobs and try to be tough for people who try to be like steve jobs and be brutally honest. Dont try it this because steve could pull off because the 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 connect emotionally to was so when you talk about his home life, his office life, there were people around him, his wife his kid who truly felt said sheep passionate appreciation and love for him and so it was more complex and some people may get out. I wish i had conveyed that better in the book. Some people read the book and say he was kind of mean. 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, i would give up anything in the world 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 recent book the innovators as an electronic book who loves ham radios and you give your ham radio address. Guest john thomas speeder. I am old enough to have gotten my first experiences on circuits for ham radio and getting to play with a ham radio. Host remember when vacuum tubes gave way to transistors. You write that historians of science are sometimes wary about calling periods of great change revolutions because they view progress as evolutionary. Are we in a revolution or evolution . Guest we are in a revolution like the Industrial Revolution. We had the steam engine that connect with mechanical processors like blooms a weaving machines will whatever and suddenly we move into an Industrial Age where machines and people are having to Work Together, they do products. We have that here with microchip, the computer the internets all working together so three inventions each of which would have been important but the combination of packets with digital networks, microprocessors and microchips with the computer revolution we have leads to a whole new way of doing not only information but conducting business your social life so it is definitely at revolution and i do remember, as the person, a quote somebody, a great historian of science at harvard who wrote about the scientific revolution, says theres no such thing as a scientific revolution and this is a book about it. And they knew they were going to revolution. So talk about introducing the book says a kid. You look at at vacuum tube and figure out how it works, if it is burned out or not. It is an amplifier and don office which so how does the circuit do logic just by us stepbystep of on off switches like that . So you get a feel and this is where i worry today is that people, my daughters generation or whatever dont quite have a feel about how the on off switches and logical circuits logic gates and algebra all come together to say we can have a machine that can do these tasks. Host you say math is spiritual. Guest a lovelace the beginning of the innovators, lord byrons daughter, the great romantic poet, she has a political streak in her but her mother was the mathematician and as you might imagine knowing something about lord byron his wife was not particularly fond of lord byron, was a little