Death, it went immediately to number one on amazon. Italy a month before its release. Since then, it has dominated every bestseller list and every part of the world. Walter isaacson has been at this for a while. He is not only a distinguished journalist, former chairman of cnn, former managing editor of time, next year will mark the 20th anniversary of his first major biography of Henry Kissinger. To that, he has added the biography of Benjamin Franklin, i would in this book on steve jobs. Days agoi talked a few about opening this evening with Something Special returning items from her landmark collection which you can see youre on stage. What is going to have to introduce these guys with their black tournaments on. Dont they look good . Dozen itemst three from apple, it is one of the largest collections of its kind in the world dealing with apple. After steve died, we would collectionsugh the of what was the best of the best, we discovered something very amazing. This was a tape that Regis Mckenna had made in 1980 of a 25 euros steve jobs making a 22 minute presentation at stanford on the race of apple and his vision for the company. We have digitized that and we put it on our website. It is never been seen before. We will play about two minutes of it tonight. I hope you will be as amazed as we were when you see it. Idea what before going to think when we started out. We couldnt afford to buy a california computer. We got departs from different people. We worked out of designs for six months and decided we would build our own computers. So we built them. He was up till four in the morning for many months. Everybody wanted one. It took about 40 hours to the bodies. These. Build one of we helped our friend bill computers. Build computers. That one day we would put Circuit Boards without the parts. I got the calculator, we had 3000 bucks. 1300 bucks to do a layout. We thought we would buy a Circuit Board for twice what it was. That is what we did. I was out trying to peddle pc boards one day. I wanted to a bike shop in mountain view. Inwalked into a bike shop mountain view. I saw dollar signs and fun of my eyes in front of my eyes. ,e wanted one fully assembled tested and ready to go. That was a new twist. We got the electronic parts distributors around here and we worth of parts. We build 100 computers and result 50 of them for cash and in 29 days paid update distributors. That is how get started. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome me in joining please join me in welcoming walter isaacson. [applause] how great it is to be here at the museum. Can i give a shout out to Steve Wozniak . Steve all the history is here. Totally intimidating me because i will look over and they will build be nodding and shaking their heads. This is a Silicon Valley crowd. We are so happy to have you here. Let me ask you about the very first meeting with steve jobs. You described yourself as a junior editor of the times. He comes to new york to demonstrate the macintosh. Walter walter with the original mac. Walter there he is with the original mac. It shows us how thin it is. He shows us all the graphical icons and you can tell he is passionate about every pixel. He is furious at Time Magazine for telling us we are not as good as newsweek. A horribled written story about him. I saw the petulant side. That is when i first started to realize the impatience and and p is a megasalt etulance you solid steve jobs. Make a particular impression on you at that moment . I was mesmerized. He is very compelling person. He saw there, that is what he was. Hes telling the stories. He was mad because he had not been made man of the year. I was an idiot on the wrong side and i voted for paul volker. None of your member who he was. But we had done the machine. It was machine of the year. You could tell the first time he met steve jobs that there was something compelling about him. 2004,forward 20 years to he gets in touch with you. Walter he gives me a call. Please we talked a little while. He said he was to come take a walk with me. He says what you do a biography of me . I had done ben franklin, i was finishing albert einstein. I went ben franklin, albert einstein, steve jobs. I set you are great subject but lets wait 30 years until you retire. Until 2009 when he had his liver transplant that is sort of suck in that he was fighting cancer. He had transformed with his team a wide variety of industries. It had point, by 2009, transformed the Music Industry with itunes and the ipod. The way we listen to music, the phone industry, the publishing industry, tablet computing. All right,n i said this is too good to pass up. Do you have a. About this eight. Do you have a theory about this . He told me something that edwin land had said to him. You always want to stand in the intersection of liberal arts and sciences. Humanities and technology or engineering. That is something that we lost in the cp snow era. My. Among others was that connecting feats ofy to wonderful engineering is what made him so magical. You wrote something in the book, a quote, his passion for perfection let him to indulge his instinct to control. I want to talk about the editorial control lesson. You must have had to raise that and settle that early on. And i was stunned that it never came up. After al he said while he said it was your book, im not going to read it. He said i wanted to be honest. I want you to interview people who didnt like being as well as people who did. He said that he was brutally honest. His whole life, he did not want it to feel like an inhouse book. He wanted it to feel like an independent book. Therefore, he was going to exercise no editorial control. Did that ever change . Did,r the one time he simon and schuster put into the design that was a placeholder. I landed in San Francisco coming to a Product Launch he was going to do. I can remember which one. I saw six or seven missed calls from steve jobs. [laughter] you all know the San Francisco airport. He just starts yelling at me. He says you have no taste, the title is gimmicky. It is ugly. I dont want you to come to the demonstration. Finally, he says i am not going to continue to cooperate unless you allow me to have input into the cover. It took me somewhere between a second and a second and a half to say sure. Hes been a lot of time trying to make it a simple, clean cover. That was the one time i felt his wrath. Also, one time he had editorial input. You quote his friend who coined the term walter fieldy distortion he would talk to me about it. The engineers that come from a star trek series. Simply by thinking something and be convinced of something, even if it is impossible, you can commit other people. The secret of the reality distortion field is that it sometimes works. They can convince people to do the impossible. Steve wozniak talked to me about that. It was about his own book and steve saying you have to do this and a few days. In a few days. Steve said you can do it. That was the reality of the distortion field. Fortis had been done. Four days had been done. Whether or not i have been stuck sucked into it. I found myself deeply, emotionally invested with him. I tried very hard to be honest in the book. I try to put all things and all sides in the book. There will be people in this audience to know more than most if you read the book and say ais guy got caught in reality distortion field. I guess the answer would be yes. You had the luxury of long historical detachment from einstein, Benjamin Franklin. Biographyre writing a of a very compelling living person, up close and personal interviews. 40 walter when steve did his stanford speech, he said limit three stories. You become a storyteller, you dont try to preach. I just try to let the stories tell themselves. Discoveredthings i by having so much time with him and so much time with 150 other people who work with him was how much more we know or i could know about him than i did about Benjamin Franklin were or einstein. Einstein, they are so compelling his papers. Compiling his papers. We have one little journal entry here, maybe a newspaper clip. With steve, everything that happened, i hear about it at great length. Then i hear other people possible versions of it. Knowing 100nded up times more than him and a story in the book then you would doing somebody who is doing it through letters or journalists. Lets talk about the storytelling. The place i would like to begin is his partnership with Steve Wozniak. That starts with him. Steve was on the night shift because they find it easier to work with him if his he is on the night shift. He learned a lot at atari. The notion of how to do some subchips. Pongave to remember that had to be so simple that a stoned freshman could figure it out. That simplicity got embedded in him. At one point, you have one of the few copies at the Computer History Museum of the blue box when esquirerted magazine wrote about capn crunch and the people who can replicate the bone l system tones. A lot of that was steve jobs saying that we have to do this. They found the bell system manuals and made an analog version that did not quite work. Stevegoes up to wozniak goes off to berkeley. They make a digital version of it. You see the partnership. Andnt see Steve Wozniak whether or not he is shaking his head or not. He comes up with this amazing Circuit Board and loves to show it off. Steve says we can package it and sell it. We can make money. They start going door to door selling this thing. At one point, testing it out by calling the vatican with woz pretended to be Henry Kissinger. Tell, they never really got the pope on the phone. The entire college of cardinals was eventually smart enough to figure out that it was not Henry Kissinger calling. When held me that described that story and the whole blue box story that if it had not been for the blue box, it would not have been apple. What could they do together . Walter they commented each other well. That he say of woz could have way better Circuit Boards. Woz had been taught by his father, being an engineer. He never thought about putting it in a package. We should get a good sour pie and integrated. Aybe we can sell it greatteve did was take ideas and come up with a great vision and pull it all together doit something amazing something amazing. That was a Perfect Partnership for somebody who can design a Circuit Board with one quarter of a number of ships that any other engineer would take to make it work. The process of invention is not a singular endeavor. It is not one person sitting in a room, finding that moment. It is about that collaboration. When you take up einstein, was there a relationship . Have you found that these kinds of relationships occur over and over . Was a with einstein, it true, solo act. Especially the greatest and most elegant of theories, general relativity. He is pacing alone in his apartment in berlin on or months on end. Wase, even though he sometimes tough on people truly created teams like the original macintosh team. Together as ifd they were pirates. Able to create collaborative teams. He did at his whole life. Even now, the past eight or nine years at apple, you have had an intensely loyal, great, collaborative team. Applicants up and running. Apple get up and running. Running. Gets up and that is what you heard on the tape. When wozup and running creates a Circuit Board. Then they put it all together. Steve decides they have to incorporate. Just like these were here. Right here. The way the steve tells me the story, he worked on a commune around reed college. Was there, tended to the apples and him come back from the apple farm and says ok, we will create a company. He gets all excited. Not only will we create a product, we will have our own company. They have all sorts of executrix and personal computer things. Appl says, what about us just apple . It has a widthy, of counterculture. It is also americanized pie. It is kind of friendly, it also has a whiff of counter culture. E. Is also american as pit apple is growing and they are the earlyis team in history of the postincorporation. Period. They come on the scene and you need money. What they are doing is going from the apple one to the apple two. They created a beautiful case, the plastic molding. It is going to cost a lot of money to do. You cant sell your calculator to get them. They need investment capital. They sign a line of credit. Gives steve a great piece of advice. Needs to focus. Keep your focus. The other is empathy. It isperfect word for it, to make in emotional connection for the people who will buy your product. Then the third is also not a great word. Impute means to cast an aura around what you do. Steve had his own personal name on the patents. When you open up and there was that ipod cradle, you imputed that it was something really cool just the way it was. That is what the apple ii does. It imputes that is a very cool machine. Onhe obsessed with the curve the corners. He had been fascinated by the sony style. Right when they moved out of the garage they were in a little office. Is a sony showroom next door is a sony showroom. Eichlerup in a joseph home. Simple,e massmarketed, Frank Lloyd Wright style homes for the everyman. It was that style of thinking is is thebut the simplicity ultimate sophistication. Clean, white, simple. That is the style for apple. The apple ii takes off and they are selling hundreds of thousands of units. Servicese in the book tempermental and bratty it seems there is a very big breakout. There was a petulant side. People. Ts to grate on walter he was temperamental. He has a passion to have end to end control of a project. There was an original president , mike scott, he tried to temper jobs. Eventually, they bring in john steve. To try to handle but with steve, you got the all package. S was aperamentalnes part of it. It showed how he cared. Book was a story in the where steve was made by his house where he grew up. He built a fence with his dad. He said by that taught me to make the back of the fence as beautiful as the front. I asked him why. I said nobody will ever know. My dad said but you will k now. When they get to the macintosh, even though you cant open it, he held it up for a while. Boardairs on the circuit the chips of the Circuit Board were not aligned. They told him the same thing, nobody will know, no one can open it. He said you will know. End to end control. It has slots. , you could check into it. You could open it up, you begin to the Circuit Board. Steve was against having slots. He didnt want anyone to have an open source on the lyrics. He didnt want people jacking in an opening up. He wantsts that them to have these slots. That was very steep jobs like. All the way through his career, really believing and tightly controlling like the gardens of kyoto that he loved to visit, carefully walled, carefully tended by one artist. Lets move to the macintosh in iraq. There is so much macintosh era. There is so much going on. Walter it was a bad mistake. It was almost like he saw john skully as a father figure or mentor. Scully really wanted to be cool stevesand wanted approval. , the apartment that he was thinking of buying, andrings john skully up want to spend the rest of your life selling sugar water or do you want to do something meaningful . He is a man of cap school disability, great manners. It is hard for him to deal with conflict. Steve felt the price. Steve said the price of admission of being with me is i is be able to tell you that yo uau are full of it. You need to be able to tell me im full of it. We need to be able to duke it out. Skully was not worrying about the product. He wasnt worried about the radars. It was shelf space marketing. Felt thatat steve skully didnt get into how awesome the mac was. At 2500riced macintosh bucks. Microsoft started dominating the computer business and so i think their relationship was doing fine as long as apple is doing fine and the apple ii was a workhorse. Didnt. Is a horrible falling out that culminates on memorial day in 1985. But always talk about the falling out, lets talk about the design of the macintosh itself. This is the point in the book where you insert the famous quote from jobs. Good artists copy, great artists steal. You always been channels about stealing great ideas. Shameless about stealing great ideas. They take two visits to xerox parc. Xerox had come up with the concept of the desktop metaphor. These pixel on the screen could be mapped to fit in the microprocessor. You can make a beautiful machine. You and i are beautiful young to remember it. We remember we have to do those green letters with c prompt and\whatever command. It was godawful. Suddenly, Time Magazine, we get the mac. You can drag and drop. I do a whole section on the visit to xerox parc. I think they took the graphical interface from xerox parc. It took years from some of the most amazing designers to take what the metaphor that xerox used and to make a great. Xerox came out with something before the mac came out. It was a bad machine. What they did was take that metaphor and take the mouse with three buttons and simple fire. You will be a look to click and drag and drop and doubleclick and open things up. We will invent pulldown menus. You can have documents looking like the top of other documents. It was like a messy desktop. None of that was in the xerox original graphical interface. They take the xerox metaphor and actually make it insanely great. Secondly, tsl is lining up. This falls between conception and reality. They were able to execute on its. It is true that part of steves at a thousand ideas at any given point and saying that one is great. This one sucks. Were going to ignore this one. But pulling together ideas including ideas from xerox parc. This is one of the times where he is pushing this team incredibly hard. Reality distortion field is coined. Is in of the engineers charge of the bootup of the machine. Says it is taking too long to boot up. You need to shave 10 seconds off time. Ot up he says i cant. Shavesays if you could ten seconds off of saving a life, would you . He goes yeah. He multiplies it out and says that you can save this number of lives every year if you s