Discipline like the arts and sciences, the way ben franklin did, the way ada lovelace did and Albert Einstein. We talk about innovations so often, its almost drained of its meaning, and ive always liked to write about real people who are in a situation whether it whether it be after world war ii when you have to create a whole new world order like the world bank and the Marshall Plan or steve jobs who says okay we are now in a digital revolution and have to make it personal. These are people who are able to think different and outofthebox. So i want to try to explore the creative mind and how it works. Host one of the themes in all of your her books seems to be the connection to spirituality. Everybody had written about the leaves believes whatever they did was part of something larger than themselves. I remember sitting with steve jobs at the end of his life and i asked him why did you do what you do, what was the meaning and he said life is like a river. You get to pick things out of the river, really cool things people have done from great devices great ideas but after a while you realize it is and how much you get to pick out of the river but you put back. What you leave behind so that your spirit is still manifest after youve been gone. Whether it is Albert Einstein or Benjamin Franklin or anybody else, they did have a connection to something supernatural something somewhat larger than themselves. Host from 2011 your book on steve jobs opening sentence in the early summer of 2004 i got a phone call. Ive written or Benjamin Franklin and i must admit my first reaction was ben franklin come Albert Einstein you but then i realized hed been sick and fighting cancer and we dont always look at Creative Minds in business and entrepreneurship and timmy to be able to get very close to and try to kill back the layers on the greatest business and Technology Innovators of my day in generations was going to be something truly special. Ive known him since he came to Time Magazine to show off the original macintosh. We had remained moderately good friends ever since. Especially when i had something he wanted on the cover. We had a great meal together and he would tell me how awesome the product was. So i really like steve jobs. I liked his passion. When he gave me a call i realized this is Something Special i guess to be up close to the genius. Host i asked him why he wanted me to be the one to write the biography and you are getting good at getting people to talk. Guest he was someone that understood the power of listening. And i think i learned that from him a little bit too because when i started looking and working with him i would ask a lot of questions and premises and then finally i realized if i just let him go and say ipod and then he would go on for an hour or two i could a really listening to try to pick up the rhythm of the way that his mind worked. So, im not necessarily the best academic historians and i may not even be the best reporter when it comes time to writing books. But im pretty good at just 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 the Time Magazine if i called up and ask to asked to speak to larry page im more likely than the average person to get through so i feel i should try to do that reporting and i should go visit will and spend time with larry page because ive been blessed to have that access of people just because ive been in journalism viable life so thats what i try to bring to the party. There will be people who will take the steve jobs or the innovators buck and do better in their own system of what does this really mean how does this lead to leadership lessons . But for me i can call people up try to get the quotes right as if it is a first draft for other people who might be able to analyze things from the books. Host so is this authorized guest not in the technical sense of the term because when steve and i talked he kept saying i dont want to read the book first to cause he said to me one of the things that made steve jobs what he that he was is that he was brutally honest. He said ive always tried to be brutally honest and i want you to be brutally honest. 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. I will read it six months after it comes out and thats why in the summer of 2011 after he stepped down from apple we discussed when should the book come out. He said i think 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 he was going to be alive when the book came out. In fact he told me the last time we talked when i turned the book and i promised you i wasnt going to read it right when it came out but i will read it six months later and this was in late august and that made me feel good i thought okay hes going to beat cancer one more time but then of course we were not so lucky. Host said he has no idea . Guest i did down and read the last chapter where i take a lot of things he told me if i bring it together and let him have the last word for pages of the book where from different interviews i took his thoughts about why he did what he did which made him creative and so i put those together from two or three separate interviews i have and i wanted to read it out loud to him to make sure he was comfortable with it. There are also some things in the book where hes tough on people or anecdotes im not sure you and i would want and i made sure he knew about each one of those especially ones where i thought he might want to like when hes mean to somebody i wanted to let him explain his side of it so anything in the book i thought might be a little tough that he wouldnt like i made sure he knew about this before because thats the way he was. He didnt try to sugarcoat things. If he thought you were not going to like something he would say about right. So i would go over things i thought he wouldnt like. Host youll find good things off offensive behavior of command there are five pages where the offensive behavior is in their and a couple other things, primal scream therapy . That was something that as i say he might must make it very up close and talk about things like his therapy or 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 cases i felt by the end of the process i knew more about him than i did about myself because he was a very self reflective individual. He understood himself extraordinarily well and once you started peeling away the layers he was very willing to talk about it and fortunately for me repeatedly he encouraged me to put it all. There were a few things i left out and i just thought were unnecessarily painful to some other people and didnt give much of an insight on steve so i could go over it with my wife and say that story should be left out, that could actually hurt this person and it wont hurt that it could help the reader that much he would say that it didnt, whether it was about his previous girlfriend or the daughter he had before he got married, all of these things and he said i told you that those in. Host was he smart you write no not exceptionally. Guest icon. And contrast him to absolutely wonderfully smart guy bill gates. He had what we would call conventional mental Processing Power. I marvel and watch bill gates take charge of information is. He would be processing the information and be absolutely brilliant. Steve wasnt a brilliant in that way. He didnt have that analytical Processing Power. He had an intuitive genius for what people would like, the feel for beauty and what would work, so timmy i even saw it in Albert Einstein he wasnt the best physicists physicist in europe in 1905. In fact he was a third class path and examiner because he couldnt even get his phd. He couldnt get a job at a 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 leap. They were not even in the same quantum orbit as Albert Einstein that there was a similarity which is that the genius of steve jobs came from making intuitive leap imaginative way questioning received wisdom and thats what ben franklin did come Albert Einstein, the question things you and i might. The wisdom of the writing at the beginning at the time marches along second by second. You get this patent clerk Albert Einstein saying how do we know that, how would we test that and try to synchronize them . Likewise with steve jobs people didnt think we needed a thousand songs in our pockets. We had mp3 players, but he had a feel for beauty and Customer Experience but to me made him the greatest genius of the digital age. Host there is one aspect and that was the cover. We will show the original and then the paperback cover as well. Guest when i first did the cover when he got mad he got very mad. Landed at the San Francisco i poured i was worried. I thought maybe something happened. He starts saying you have no taste and i had no idea what he was talking about. Tell me what youre upset about. He said that cover. Apparently they put it in some online category and he said thats the ugliest thing ive ever seen i dont want to cooperate with you anymore because you are going to put an ugly cover on the buck. 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 i ever had to make. I said helped me suggest a better cover. He said blackandwhite, make it simple. We went through a lot of photographs. The hardback edition, the older steve jobs you probably have it on the screen now. Thats one of the great photographers. I worked with him and i think that he did that Fortune Magazine and a sister publication that there are four or five pictures he was considering including one that they had done earlier. I was hoping we could agree and we did buy the very end. Then he just wanted that type if you look at it its got no curly cues or the doodads. It was a very simple font. He loves finds. Benjamin Franklin Mike said too so the only thing if he wanted my name and archetype and his name in white or a thinking it was my book. But it has nothing to do with me. Youve cooperated. Every word is built on something that you said so i wanted to be in the darker type and need to be more recessive and thats how it turned out that there were maybe eight or nine conversations with his own directors making sure that cover that looks so simple took a lot of work. Sometimes simplicity is the ultimate and in custody is difficult because theres steve jobs and theres the great designed or actors they say simplicity isnt just about making things easy. You have to understand the depth of something. Its hard work to create simplicity to leave out something and that is what he was able to do on the ipod to the iphone the ipad the original macintosh, and he pushed to make sure that it was done on the cover. Host why the younger steve jobs on the paperback sex guest by the time the hardback has been out for a year, alberta watsons photograph was similar and they used on their posters and the memorial services. It has become a standardized photograph and there were people both at apple andsign n. And schuster. I also saw the picture and i think that was done for the Rolling Stones in the early 1980s. Whether it was watson or apple or simon and schuster everyone thought we wouldnt be thinking different if we use that and i think apple felt lately that iconic and classic image was something that they owned and i wanted to make sure that was the paperback because they asked that we try to think different. She was so good it is deeply understood. Had she not they can do what he was. He wasnt having dinner every night with famous people. Whether at home or the office or whatever, but the one thing that you discover is that even though hes rough around the edges, he developed a team of people who was deeply loyal and more than just loyal, they loved him and likewise when he has a mountain and a family whos not only loyal to him but deeply loves him and so when people say he was a pretty rough character. I would say yes but i hope you look at what happens is that he is able to have deep love and loyalty at home and at the office and therefore put it into the context because some people were mean and nasty and a steve if steve had something else. It wasnt just like it was hard to deal with. He connected to people and inspired them and made them love him and that is the essence. Every now and then i will read articles with people who try to be like steve jobs and be brutally honest. Yeah but dont try this because he 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 and so when you talk about his home life and his office life there were people around him, his wife and his kids who truly felt a deep passionate appreciation and love for him and so it was more complex than some people make it out and i wish i conveyed that better in the buck. People say he was kind of mean. Wait, wait i tried over and over in the buck to say yes he was tough on people but whether its the original macintosh team or his familycome he would give up anything in the world to make sure he would have the opportunity to work with him custody with him, to be around him. Host in the introduction to your book the innovators come in your most recent book, as an electronics g. Can come up and you give your radio and address here. Im old enough to have gotten my First Experience soldering circuits and getting to play with the hand radio. Host i remember when they gave way to transistors and science is sometimes weary about calling the great change revolutions because they prefer to view progress as evolutionary are we in a revolution or evolution . Guest the steam engine connects with the mechanical processes and suddenly we move into an Industrial Age where machines and people have to work together. I think we have that here with the computer and the internet all working together each of which would have been important but the combination of the switched Digital Networks with sort of the computer revolution that we have leads to a new way of doing that only information, but conduct during business and so its a revolution and i do remember a great historian of science who wrote a book about the scientific revolution then he says its because of the thoughts of the people at the time that knew they were going through a revolution so i talked about introducing the buck you look at the vacuum and get it tested to see if its burned out or not. So how does the circuit do logic with the step by step off switches like that and so you get the feel they dont quite have a feel about having on off switches all coming together to say we have a machine that can do these tasks. Host and in fact you say that math is a spiritual. Guest shes the beginning and is lord byrons daughter. So she has a political speak in her but her mother was a is a mathematician and as you might imagine he was a little too much of a romantic and have had her tutored in mathematics as if that was some antidote of being romantic and being a puppet. And its what she calls political science. The combination of poetry science and art and this is the essence of everybody ive written about. Albert einstein does it. Its been sort of what has driven progress since cynthia nardo da vinci is a great engineer and artist to combine the two disciplines and all of this work. So to me, the notion that there is a connection between mass and Natural Beauty there are a lot of people who get upset on the humanities education. They also but i also feel that they loved the arts and humanities to have a beauty for the feel of math as well just as you love shakespeare people would be appalled if somebody said they didnt know the difference between hamlet and macbeth but then they would brag that they didnt know the difference between the transistor and the resistor or the gene of the chromosome or the equation of the differential efficient. She knew that it was a good lords brushstroke for something beautiful in the universe and that people say its hard i would say take the line of the poetry. She walks in beauty like the night. That is a tough line that you can visualize just like the beauty of an equation. Thats what i meant by saying that theres a beauty in both the arts and humanities and technology and science on the other side. Host youve got the email in here. What is it that she contributed. Guest there are steam engines and they would be have such beautiful patterns. They were defending the followers smashing these looms because they felt it would put people out of work. But she would save those punch cards of thanks beautiful patterns. It was unusual for a woman in the 1830s to publish but with the punch cards peace machines can do anything, not just numbers. Host you quoted her as saying the bounds of the arithmetic and cards had occurred. The analytical engine doesnt occupy Common Ground with the calculating machines. It holds the position on its own to the extent of the uniting link that has established established between the operations of matter and the abstract process. Guest in 1992 or 1993 i became the head of Digital Media for Time Magazine and time warner. And so you would run into people and so throughout the 90s i was always wanting to do a history of the digital revolution because each day. I had a feeling we were living through this revolution. I started interviewing people and did a cover story on bill gates talking about what with the revolution would bring. They talked to him at least as a wonderful guy who was another wonderful person and writes the internet protocols. How do you think that these profits make an intranet out of it and so i got a chance to be up close with these people and to me, as i said earlier in the sh