>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
>> Marie Arana: Welcome everybody.
Welcome to The National Book Festival.
My name is Marie Arana.
I am a consultant to the Librarian of Congress and a writer
at large for the Washington Post.
It's an honor and a privilege to be here on this historic mall
for the 12th Book Festival brought to you by The Library of Congress,
an institution I think of as one of the Wonders of the World.
Since 1800 Thomas Jefferson contributed his own collection
of books as the seed for the library to serve his fledgling country.
The library has been a mecca for booklovers, like you, ever since.
I hope you take the opportunity to look at the marvelous programs
and exhibits that our great national library offers the public both
onsite and online.
I have a couple -- two tiny, little housekeeping things before I move
on to introduce our first speaker.   I know you're eager to hear him.
First is that when the question and answer period comes and you step
to the microphone you are virtually giving permission for your face
and your words to be archived in The Library of Congress.
So if you're on the Witness Protection Program you may not want
to do that.
The other thing that I want to mention is
that we have a late addition to the festival.
Tomorrow at 2:45 Bob Woodward will be appearing at the festival.
But I am here to introduce a writer who has made his mark
through an impressive career as a journalist
but he has also found time to give us some wonderful books.
His name is known around the globe and I'm not kidding.
I don't say this lightly.
I have seen it on posters in small towns in Peru
and in posh book stores in Oslo.
The book that put him on those posters is a runaway best-seller
about one of the most inventive,
transforming business men America has ever produced, Steve Jobs.
I'm speaking, of course, about Walter Isaacson.
As President and CEO of the Aspen Institute, a forum committed
to the exploration of ideas,
Walter has been a tireless mirror on our culture.
But he's also a gifted biographer, the author of six nimble,
incisive human portraits, among them "The Wisemen" about the architects
of the Cold War, a biography about Henry Kissinger,
another one about Albert Einstein and a marvelously readable biography
of one of my heroes Benjamin Franklin.
The Washington Post has called his books fresh, lively,
imaginative and wonderfully written.
From book-to-book Walter has striven to explain what it is
that makes a great leader not only of nations
but of science, ideology and commerce.
Walter is one of those people who moves easily from history
to politics to mass communication
and there's a reason why he's been the editor of Time Magazine,
the Chairman and CEO of CNN, the Chairman of The Broadcasting Board
of Governors, the Chairman of Teach for America;
somewhere along the way he began to turn his voracious appetite
for a good story to making stories of his own.
"Steve Jobs," his latest book, is a deeply absorbing exploration
of the life and personality of the Founder and Chief of Apple, Inc.
Given the opportunity to hear the story from Steve Jobs himself
to write an authorized biography someone else might have turned the
book into a hagiography, a puff piece,
heavy on accomplishments and light on flaws.
But Walter's book is anything but that.
It is a full scale, warts and all portrait of a fascinating American.
It's the story of a boy who started a vision in his garage with a friend
from down the street and turned it into a worldwide phenomenon.
As Donald Graham, the President of The Washington Post Company,
said yesterday, Walter Isaacson's book is
yet another perfectly designed product by Steve Jobs for Jobs knew
that for a book about him to be any good it would have to be written
by a veteran telling it exactly the way he saw it
and he chose the right man.
I'm delighted to introduce a Washington Institution,
a newsman par excellence and an American with a deep,
deep appreciation for its history.
Ladies and gentlemen, Walter Isaacson.
>> Walter Isaacson: Thank you Marie and thank all of ya'll
in for the National Book Festival.   It's great to be back.
It was about eight years ago that I got a phone call from Steve Jobs.
I had known him for the past 20 years, since 1984 when he came
to Time Magazine to show off that wonderful Macintosh computer.
And even back then in 1984 I saw the passion for perfection and also
that impatience that was bred into his personality
and how those two things were connected.
He showed off the Macintosh at Time Magazine
and how beautiful each icon was, made us use a jeweler's loop to look
at the beauty of the pixels, the design,
that little off kilter disc drive that made it look like a smile.
But then he told us that our magazine stank,
actually he used a four letter word that I won't use for CSpan
and he said Newsweek was much better because we had not made him man
of the year and I realized then that, that connection
of that passion for perfection
and that driving impatience were all part
of a seamless system the way a great Apple product from the hardware
to the software to the content is part of a seamless system.
So when he called me about eight years ago I had just finished --
I had finished publishing "Benjamin Franklin."
I was just finishing up "Albert Einstein" and Steve said I want
to take a walk with you and he said why don't you do my biography next.
Now my first thought was okay, Ben Franklin, Albert Einstein, you.
But the more I thought about it as Marie said here's somebody
who was the American creation myth, the innovation myth, writ large
and writ true starting a company in his parent's garage with the kid
down the street and turning it into the most valuable company
in the history of the planet and doing so by creating great products
that transformed the personal computer industry,
the music industry, the publishing industry, the retail store industry,
the digital animated movie industry, phone industry,
up and down the line he was transformative.
And so what I realized then, especially since he told me,
was that he stood at the intersection of beauty
and technology; the notion of standing at that intersection
of the arts and the sciences.
Whenever you see him do a product launch back in the period
of the iPod, iPad and iPhone the launch always ended with a picture
on the screen of the arts -- the liberal arts street intersection
with the sciences street.
And I realized that there was a common theme
with Einstein and Benjamin Franklin.
A theme of creativity, of not necessarily being just smart,
because most of you here probably know a lot of smart people
and you know that smart people are kind of a dime a dozen.
They don't usually amount to much but it's the innovative, creative,
imaginative person who ends up thinking different
as Steve would say and amounting to something.
And that was the common thread
of the different people I had written about.
And so I got very excited about a rare opportunity to be really
up close to somebody who had transformed our world to be able
to spend day after day, hour after hour with him and to be able to try
to write a story that looked at creativity, innovation and beauty.
So what I would like to do today is a particular I hope,
what we call in Louisiana a lagniappe,
a little something extra for you.
I'm going to talk about all three people instead
of just doing a speech about Steve Jobs.
You'll get three for the price of one today because I want to,
as I was thinking about coming here,
distill what I thought were the key innovation lessons
from the three most recent subjects I had written about.
Starting with Steve Jobs; Steve was somebody who really believed
that beauty mattered and that success came
from making what he called in the 1980's an insanely great product.
All of you have been involved in business and know --
and creative things know that there's two ways
of looking at a business.
Steve said you could focus on making a profit or you could focus
on making a great product.
If you focus on making a profit eventually you're going
to cut a few corners.
You're not going to make the greatest product you can make.
But if you really focus on making the greatest possible product,
the most beautiful product eventually the profits will follow.
Plus you'll make a dent in the universe.
You'll be a real artist.   You'll have made something special.
I remember walking around the neighborhood that he grew up,
his childhood home, a tract house in Los Altos and we were looking
at a fence that he had built with his father
when Steve was about eight years old.
And Steve told me that I had to come around and look at the back
of the fence to see how pretty it was.
And he said when we were building the fence my father said
to me we have to make the back of this fence just as beautiful
as the front of the fence.
And Steve said why, nobody will ever see it.
Nobody will ever know.
And his father said to him yes but you will know.
You will care and the person who has a passion
for even the parts unseen is the person who is always going
to be a good craftsman and make something right.
This I saw over and over again in Jobs' career.
For example, when they're launching the Macintosh,
that beautiful machine he showed me in 1984 with that wonderful,
sealed case like an appliance, beautifully designed like a piece
of art but before they shipped it Steve looked at the circuit board
and he said to the engineers on the team this circuit boards stinks.
The word stinks is my euphemism for words
that Steve sometimes uses a little bit stronger.
And they said what do you mean?
And he said well it's not beautiful, the chips aren't lined up.
And the engineers said well Steve this is a sealed appliance.
You've made it so nobody can even open the Mac.
It's a perfect appliance,
nobody will ever see the circuit board, nobody will ever know.
And Steve said what his father had said to him
which is yes but you will know.
So they hold up shipping the Macintosh
until that circuit board has all the chips lined up beautifully
and equally spaced and when they got it ready Steve had them all take a
whiteboard and sign their names with Steven P. Jobs all in lower case
in the middle to engrave next to the circuit board on the inside
of that original Macintosh case where nobody would ever see it,
nobody would ever know but he said real artists sign their work.
It was that passion for perfection that made him a,
if you've read my book, sometimes a strong cup of tea;
somebody hard to deal with, somebody who could drive people crazy,
drive them to distraction but also drive them
to do things they didn't know that they could do;
drive them to do the things they thought were impossible
because when you have that passion
for product even though you might drive people crazy they become loyal
to you because they're inspired by your vision
of making something of beauty.   And I saw that over and over again.
They sometimes called it the reality distortion field,
those of you who are old enough like me,
to remember the old Star Trek episodes.
The reality distortion field is just when sheer force
of will the aliens could create a galaxy.
Steve could create amazing things by sheer force of will.
It started even early on when he and Wozniak were working at Atari
or Steve was working on the night shift at Atari.
And at one point they were supposed to create a game called Breakout
which was a single player version of Pong and Steve says
to Waz you've got to design the code in four days because we have
to get back to the Apple Commune for the weekend.
They were working on an Apple Commune in Oregon
or Steve was hence the name of the company
that they would eventually found.
And Waz says to him I can't do this code in four days,
it's going to take me a couple of weeks.
Steve Jobs had taught himself even then to stare without blinking
and he started at Waz and kept saying don't be afraid,
you can do it.
And Waz -- don't be afraid, you can do it.
Waz said it was amazing after a while Waz said I went back
to my little cubicle, I stayed up four nights in a row and I was able
to write the coding for Breakout.
That reality distortion field over and over again was able
to help Steve push people to distraction, push them to anger
but push them to do what they thought impossible.
Even with the original Macintosh, the one I mentioned to you,
it took a long time to boot up.
It took more than 70 seconds to boot up.
It was sort of almost as slow as a Microsoft machine.
So Steve said to Larry Kenyon, the engineer,
you've got to take 10 seconds off the boot-up time.
Kenyon says well Steve it's, you know,
elegant code I don't think I can do it.
Steve said if you could save a human life would you do it?
Kenyon goes, well I guess so.
So Steve goes to a whiteboard and says there are going
to be a million Macintosh's sold next year.
They'll be booted up maybe a couple of times a week,
if you shave 10 seconds off in the course of a year you're going
to save the equivalent of 100, 130 lifetimes.
Then he looked at Kenyon and said don't be afraid, you can do it.
Kenyon said I went back, went back to work
and within two weeks I had shaved 28 seconds off the boot-up time.
Over and over again this happens.
I'll just give you one more example, one that I love,
which is with the iPhone that, you know,
walking around Georgetown day before yesterday watching the lines
on Wisconsin Avenue blocking traffic for the next iPhone.
Why, because it's a beautiful, magical piece of technology
that you love because it's
so insanely well designed and beautiful.
And when Steve started off one
of the things he didn't want was something like this;
plastic on the front of the iPhone.
He said he wanted a really great, smooth piece of glass
that was tough but silky.
And the claves in China that were making the glass for the stores
and all didn't meet his standards.
He kept saying not it's got to be better.
Finally somebody said why don't you call Corning --
Corning Glass in New York maybe they can do it.
Steve being Steve picks up the phone, calls the switchboard
at Corning and says let me speak to your CEO.
Switchboard being a switchboard said we'll take your name and number
and have somebody call you -- Steve slams down the phone
and says typical East Coast bull.
And eventually the head of Corning hears the story, smart guy,
he calls the switchboard at Cupertino, at Apple
and says let me speak to your CEO.
They say put your request in writing and fax it to us.
Steve hears about it and says that guy's cool
and they finally have a meeting.
So Steve meets with the head of Corning Glass
and says here's what we need; this type of glass, really smooth.
The head of Corning says well years ago we developed a process,
an ion transfer process that would make a glass like that
and we called it gorilla glass but we never manufactured it.
And Steve went through the process with him
and Steve said that's what I want.
I need it, I need this much by September.
We're shipping the phone this October.
And so the head of Corning said I just told you we've actually never
made that glass before.
Now this is 30 years to the month almost that he did it to Wozniak.
I remember sitting, I went up to Corning Glass,
sat with Wendell Weeks, the wonderful CEO there,
and Wendell just -- Weeks just told me the story.
He said it was amazing, the guy sat right across from me
and stared at me without blinking.
And he said don't be afraid, you can do it.
Eventually, you know, after the meeting Weeks picked up the phone
and called a plant manager of a Corning plant near Lexington,
Kentucky -- a plant manager he liked and said I want you
to start right away shifting
from making flat screen TV glass to gorilla glass.
Of course, the plant manager said well we don't have this, we --
and basically Wendell Weeks said
to him I just said don't be afraid, you can do it.
The upshot is that's why every piece of glass on every iPhone that year
and every piece of glass on every iPhone in your pocket
and iPad is made by Corning Glass
because Steve had a reality distortion field
and got people to do things like that.
He also had a passion for beauty
and for him simplicity was the ultimate sophistication
which was the phrase they used on the first Apple marketing brochure
that as Einstein would say simplicity is the key
to understanding the way the good Lord created the universe.
He believed in simplicity as beauty just as Newton did,
just as Kepler did, just as all great people who try
to understand the universe.
They understand that simplicity is a way
of saying we have not just eliminated stuff, we have gotten
to the essence and we understand it.
And we can really feel whether it's what a screw does
in a particular computer or the way Maxwell's equations deal
with the speed of light.
There is a true simplicity that is integral,
at least in Steve's mind, to beauty.
For example, when he's creating the iPod,
that absolutely wonderful machine, and what he had done over
and over again was not invent totally new things.
I can remember having an MP3 music player before the iPod.
But they were brain dead.   They were junky.
They were horrible.
You couldn't figure out how do I put songs in, how do I make a playlist,
how do I get to the song, you know, the interface,
how do I get to the song I want.   Steve said make it simple.
He said just this simple, 1,000 songs in your pocket;
three clicks to get to any song.
And they said okay, okay, no manual, no instructions.
Three clicks, so they would show him the different interfaces they were
coming up with and it would have the, you know, different ways,
he'd say well I can't get to it in three clicks.
And he'd say not good enough and they'd say well we need a screen
for the title and we need a screen for the artist and for the --
and he said no, no you don't need all that.
Three clicks, any song and finally they come
up with this absolutely beautiful, intuitive design.
You all remember it, the original iPod with just that scroll wheel.
You could get to any song you wanted.
As you scrolled longer it went down faster.
It was all simple and intuitive.
And he loves it but he looks at it and there's a big old button on top.
And he looks at it and he says what the is this.
I'll leave out the middle word.
They're a little bit scared to answer
but at one point somebody finally says Steve that's the on/off button.
Steve nods and says what the does it do.
Now they're a little scared because they know he knows what it does.
They finally say Steve it turns it on and off.
And then he says why the do we need it?
And it slowly dawns on them you don't need that big old button.
If you quit using your iPod it powers down,
if you start using it again it knows to power itself back up.
You know you don't need a big old button
to junk it up, to go on and off.   So they take it off.
And it was that -- the sort of understanding of the beauty
and the essence of simplicity.
I think that when it came to Einstein he too had
that beautiful vision of simplicity
that he always asked himself what is the simplest way to make things
as simple as possible but no simpler in order to understand the universe.
And he was driven too by the second characteristic I wanted to talk
about which is just pure driven curiosity.
Einstein when he was six years old, while Steve was building a fence,
Einstein's dad gave him a compass.
Compass, just one of those [inaudible] tool little compasses
with the needle points north.
And Einstein goes around and he keeps turning it
and nothing is touching the needle.
There is nothing physically hitting it
yet that needle keeps swinging and pointing north.
Day after day he said he walked around and looked
at it trying to figure it out.
Now you and I remember getting a compass when we were kids, probably.
And we'd go outside and go oh look it points north.
And about a minute, minute and a half later we're on to something --
oh look a dead squirrel and we're on to something else.
For his entire life Einstein was curious,
driven by a passionate curiosity for what is a force field,
how does electromagnetic field and gravity,
how does it push physical objects, what's the difference
between a force field and a particle, an object, whatever.
He's doing that his whole life.
In fact, at age 17 he starts studying Maxwell's equations
that describe an electromagnetic field.
And if you look at Maxwell's equations or if you're Einstein
and you look at Maxwell's equation that say
that an electromagnetic wave always travels at the same speed,
the speed of light relative to you.
No matter how fast you're traveling towards the source,
away from the source that light wave will always travel
at 186,000 miles per second or so; the constant speed of light.
And Einstein said, at age 17,
he does a thought experiment a light beam rider.
He said what if I was riding alongside a light beam
and I went really, really fast and I caught
up with the light wave wouldn't it appear
to be stationary relative to me?
He said but Maxwell's equations don't allow for that.
And he said he walked around in the woods for days on end,
his palms sweating because this thing so unnerved him.
He couldn't figure out how this could be.
Now I remember what was causing my palms to sweat at age 17
and it wasn't Maxwell's equations.
But that's why he's Einstein and we're not.
And even after he graduates from high school, he's a runaway,
he goes to Switzerland, he goes to the second best college in Zurich,
the polytechnic and he can't get a job, he can't get a job,
he can't get his doctoral dissertation accepted.
He's not sort of the preeminent physicist of Europe in 1905.
In fact, the only job he can get is as a third-class examiner,
a patent clerk in the Swiss Patent Office.
But he's looking at devices to synchronize clocks.
Why? Well, you know, Switzerland had just gone on standard time zones
and if any of you know Swiss people they tend to be rather Swiss.
They really want it to strike seven in Bern at the same time
at the exact same moment it strikes seven in Zurich.
And so the only way to synchronize the clocks is to send a signal
between two distant clocks and that signal whether it's a light signal,
a radio, electric, whatever type of signal travels at the speed of light
and you've got this patent clerk still saying but what if I caught
up with it; still curious.
And finally just by a thought experiment sitting on the stool
in the patent office he says, you know,
if somebody is traveling really,
really fast in one direction towards one
of the clocks what's synchronize will look different
to him then somebody traveling in the other direction really fast
because the signals will take that fraction of a fraction
of a nanosecond to catch up.
And so if what synchronies is what's different depending on your state
of motion time is different depending on your state of motion.
And he makes the correct leap that the speed
of light is always constant but time is relative depending
on your state of motion.
Now don't be afraid if you don't get it right away,
it takes the physics community about 10 years to figure
out that this 1905 paper is so cool.
But that was that curiosity that drove Einstein.
Franklin had it as well, Benjamin Franklin --
they're all runaways at 17.   They're all dropouts in some ways.
Every time I speak at a college the college president says you don't
have to emphasize the fact that all three
of them dropped out of college do you.
I say well no.   Franklin's a runaway.
Actually he drops out of high school, before --
he doesn't get to go to college.
And he goes over to England after running away to Philadelphia
because he wants to be a printer and he wants
to buy the printing fonts and type and presses.
But he hears from the ship captains how it takes a little bit shorter,
a day less, to get across the Atlantic to Europe
than it does coming back.
Something not fully explained by the prevailing winds
or the turn of the earth.
So on the way over Benjamin Franklin's curious.
He's heard about these things that the ship captains telling him.
So he drops a barrel into the ocean at different depths every few hours,
measures the temperature of the water and is able for the first time
to chart the Gulf Stream to understand what the Gulf Stream is.
That's really cool and curious at age 17.
But the thing about Franklin is, more than almost any other regular,
ordinary citizen, he traveled through his life back and forth
across the Atlantic more than anyone; many times.
And even at age 80 when he's coming back from England
after he's done the Treaty of Paris
and ended the American Revolution he's still dropping barrels
of water, still taking the temperature,
still trying to chart that Gulf Stream.
But it wasn't just the curiosity
that to me was Franklin's salient trait.
For me his salient trait was tolerance.
We are standing on a national mall that is a testament
to common ground for we the people.
The notion that we can find common ground and all come together.
But at both end of this mall there are buildings in which the notion
of understanding tolerance and common ground are
in conflict these days just as they were in 1776.
Benjamin Franklin realized that that ability to tolerate --
he had run away from Puritan Boston to a Philadelphia that was filled
with Anglicans, Moravians, Quakers, Jews, slaves, freed slaves,
all sorts of people and that being a shopkeeper on Market Street he had
to be open and be tolerant and be part of a society
that drew its strength from its diversity.
And you see that when he forms his little club of tradesmen
and artisans in Philadelphia is which they look
at the traits you need to be a good citizen.
He lists all those traits; industry, honesty, frugality and he shows it
around to the other people on Market Street
and in his club showing how well he's mastered each of these virtues.
And finally one of his fellow shopkeepers
in his leather apron club said Franklin you're actually missing a
virtue you might want to practice.
Franklin says what's that and the friend says humility.
You might want to try that one for a change.
What I love about Franklin is he said I admit it.
I was never very good at the virtue of humility.
I could never master it but I could master the pretense of humility.
I could fake it very well.
Now here's the genius and he said I learned that the pretense
of humility is just as useful as the reality of humility.
It makes you listen to the person next to you, it makes you try
to find that common ground where we all share certain values.
So through his life with this humility and pretense
of humility he's the founder who brings us together
to find the common ground.   When they're writing the Declaration
of Independence the Continental Congress creates a committee,
maybe the last time Congress created a great committee,
but it has you know Franklin, Jefferson, John Adams on it.
Jefferson gets to write the first draft.
The wonderful Library of Congress
which sponsors this event has the first draft out in the Library
of Congress and you see Jefferson's draft saying we hold these truths
to be sacred in that wonderful second paragraph.
You see Franklin's printer's pen crossing out the word
with those backslashes we hold these truths to be self-evident we write
because our rights, he said, come not from the dictates or dogma
of one religion or another but from the consent of the governed
in rationality and reason.
The sentence goes on Jefferson's draft to say and they're endowed
with certain inalienable rights.
You see John Adams' handwriting, endowed by their creator
with certain inalienable rights.
That balance of the role of divine providence and our own rationality
and reason and consent to the government in forming our government
that type of balance created this new type
of nation we created back then.
One based on tolerance, the humility or at least the pretense of humility
to listen to others and to try to find the common ground.
It even happens at the Constitutional Convention
after Franklin has come back
for the last time still measuring the Gulf Stream.
And they're fighting in Philadelphia
over the big state/little state issue.
The Connecticut compromise has gone down in flames
and finally Franklin gets up and he does a speech about humility.
He said the older I get something really strange happens to me,
I realize I'm wrong at times, that I'm fallible.
He said and you're going to get old and it's going to happen to you.
You're going to realize that at times you were wrong.
And so maybe we should each listen to the person next to us and try
to find the common ground and they come up with a compromise
that he actually makes a motion for which is a Senate based
on each state and a House based on proportional representation.
And he has them line up and sign it and he says, you know,
he says we have to each doubt our own infallibility
because this is the document that brings us together.
And when they opened the doors a woman comes up to independent
which they all called Independence Hall
and says Dr. Franklin what have you wrought?
What has been given to us in there?
And he says a republic madam if you can keep it because it was
up to each one of us to understand that tolerance
that is the heart of our society.
So those were the three virtues that I learned
from the people I wrote about.
They also had one other particular virtue which is this ability
to think different, as Steve would say,
that imagination to think out of the box.
Einstein sitting there on the desk of the --
at his desk in the patent office,
everybody else has read Newton's principia that begins with a premise
that time marches along second by second no matter how we observe it.
Every other physicist and scientist has taken that as gospel.
But Einstein, the patent clerk, says how do we know.
How can we be sure?   Let's think about this differently.
Now every now and then when I did my talk on Einstein
like that people would come up afterwards and say hey,
you know, I'm like Einstein.   I think different.
I think out of the box.
I do have to remind people it's useful to be like Einstein
and know what's in the box before you start thinking
out of the box [laughter].
But it was because he could think different that made him so cool
and such a great physicist.
Likewise with Benjamin Franklin, take so many things he did,
but for example in the 1704's and '50's people still thought
that lightening were thunderbolts from God to strike down things.
They would consecrate and bless the bells on church steeples in order
to ward off lightening and then they would store the gunpowder
in the churches.
But the lightening kept hitting the steeples of the churches
and people were killed and things would blow up
and finally Franklin said maybe we should think about this differently
and he flies that kite in the rain
which we all think is some silly little experiment.
But it is a significant scientific experiment of the time to understand
that lightening is a flow of electricity
and can be drawn down by a lightning rod.
And obviously Steve Jobs when he comes back to Apple
after being ousted in the wilderness
for 12 years the first thing he does is an ad campaign saying
think different.
And he read it to me or not read it, from memory he told me
about those ads that he wrote.
And it was here's the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels,
the round pegs in the square hole, it goes on and finally says those
who were crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones
who do.
By the end he was crying after he recited this.
He said to me that's always been the mantra,
the ability to think different.   But in thinking different
and in following your passion they also did one more thing,
all three of them.
Every now and then, in fact probably every time you hear a baby boomer
give a college commencement speech, you hear the advice
of following your passion.
They all three followed their passion.
But the important advice is this whole world isn't just
about your damn passion.
It's about being part of something larger.
It's not just about you and your passion.
It's about being part of something larger than yourself
and that's what these three people understood.
Steve Jobs around this time last year
when he was feeling very ill I asked him about that.
I asked him about, you know, what he thought the legacy would be, what --
he said, you know, I talk about following passion
but what I really now realize is that there is a flow of history.
A river of history and we all take things out of that flow of history
and get to use them; ways of making food or building houses
or wonderful products that people before us have created.
And part of our role of life is to put things back into that role
of history that are truly beautiful and truly reflect what we believe.
And I asked him did he believe that after he died, you know,
his spirit would live on.
He had been trained as a Zen Buddhist;
I said do you still believe in God.
He said I'd like to believe that when , you know,
when I die my experiential wisdom
and all I've learned will indeed endure, somehow still be there
in some fashion, in some soul, in some spirit, some incarnation.
He said but I guess sometimes I worry a little bit that maybe
when you die it's just like, you know,
an on/off switch you die and click, you're gone.
I was taken aback, of course, and just stared for a moment.
And then he gave me that wonderful half smile he has
and he said maybe that's why I didn't
like to put on/off switches on Apple devices.
But I miss him.
And as for Einstein, you know, one of those equations in 1905,
in the last paper of that year basically translated
to E equals MC squared.
And that set a lot of things in motion,
including eventually the atom bomb.
When Einstein is dying, his aorta has erupted,
he's decided not to have an operation.
He's in Princeton at the hospital knowing he has a day or so left.
What he does is he signs the Bertram Russell Albert Einstein manifesto
to say we have to control these atomic weapons in our age.
But also even as he's dying he's still that 17-year old,
that six year old curious how does that force field work.
And he had brought, he had asked his assistant to bring nine pages
of equations that he was still working on in his office.
And he sat there on his deathbed still writing line after line
of equation making math mistakes and crossing them out trying to figure
out a unified field theory, a field theory
that would help explain electromagnetism, gravity,
the force fields, the particles.
I went to Hebrew University just to look at them where they're stored
and you finally see that last line where it dribbles off
and falls a bit as he's dying because he's writing one last line
of equations that he thought would get him and the rest
of us one step closer to that spirit manifest
in the laws of the universe.
And as for Dr. Franklin that tolerance carried with him
as a larger thing and being part of something larger.
During this lifetime he donated to the building fund of each
and every church built in Philadelphia.
At one point they were building a new hall, it's still there,
still called The New Hall, right to the left of Independence Hall
and he wrote the fundraising document that said even in the Mufti
of Constantinople were to send somebody here to teach us Islam
and preach to us about Mohammed we should offer a pulpit,
we should listen for we might learn something.
And on his deathbed he's the largest,
single individual contributor of the Mikvah Israel Synagogue,
the first synagogue built in Philadelphia.
So when he dies instead of his minister accompanying his casket
to the grave; all 35 ministers, preachers and priests
of Philadelphia linked arms with the rabbi of the Jews to march with him
in the grave - to the grave.
That's what they were fighting for back then
when our country was founded.
And that's still the struggle we're in, in this world today
so I hope you've enjoyed my desolation of the three lessons
of my three great heroes.   Thank you.
[ Applause ]
Time for a couple of questions, if I may.
Virginia? The person with the Virginia t-shirt
and then the Washington National.   >> Virginia for Obama.
>> Walter Isaacson: All right and Washington Nationals.
>> One of the characteristics I thought you might speak of,
at least in one of the really phenomenal portions of your book
about Steve Jobs, was the characteristic of focus ...
>> Walter Isaacson: Focus.   >> And how he -- Apple --
when he returned to Apple to focus on what was important.
>> Walter Isaacson: Right, if I had to do the seven
or eight lessons simplicity is related to focus
and what Steve always did was I've got to filter out distractions.
For example, when he -- as you said take the example
of returning to Apple.
They were making like 40, 50 versions of the Mac to try
to milk the profits of it.
And he said why are we doing all of these computers.
Finally he said we've got to focus
and he just draws a grid says home, office, laptop, desktop.
He said that's it, just four computers.
We have to focus.
Likewise when they finally get those four computers done right they take
the top 100 people at Apple
and they're arguing what should be our next product.
They're all on a whiteboard.
They all fight to be on the first page of his whiteboard.
They get 10 of them after two and a half days from the 100 suggestions,
he crosses out the bottom seven and says we can only do three.
We have to focus.
And that's why you have the iPod, iPhone, iPad, that focus.
Yes sir?
>> I wondered if you had any particular commentary
on the theatrical work, the agony and ecstasy of Steve Jobs
and also any dramatic attempts on any
of these people you did biographies on?
>> Walter Isaacson: You know I'm a print person.
I lived in the right century.
I love books, I love the narrative form so I'm not an expert
to talk about theater or movies.
I love them, I go to them but that's just not my expertise; sorry.
Yes sir?
>> Thanks for being here and great book; loved it a lot.
And I was wondering I know you did a lot of interviews with Steve
and you did a lot of audio recordings of those interviews
and we got to hear some of those on network TV a while back.
I'm wondering if there's any plans to release those in the future?
>> Walter Isaacson: No, at the moment it's complicated but --
because there are, you know, things in it that are personal
and I really respect Steve.
And there were things I had to leave out of the book.
You always have to balance when you do a book what's useful
to the reader but also what's going to be too hurtful
to somebody or compromise Apple.
I didn't put in all of his thoughts about Apple TV.
I figured the people at Apple have the right to try
to make TV on their own now.
I've been -- I'll cooperate with people who are doing research
on things but for the moment that's complicated.
Last question, I think I've been given it
and I have wonderful woman there who deserves the last question.
>> [Inaudible].
>> Walter Isaacson: Last question here.
>> Okay, did Steve Jobs continue to be involved with the suppliers
of the materials for his products up until the end?
There's so much publicity, for instance,
about Foxconn in China, and was he [inaudible]?
>> Walter Isaacson: No one of Steve's things was focus.
And this book you'll say well gee why doesn't he worry more
about Foxconn well Tim Cook did.
Tim Cook is somebody who went over and visited and thing.
Steve always said to me I can't do anything.
I really have to as the gentleman asked at the beginning
of the question focus on what I must do best and what my true passion is.
And sometimes people say well he didn't focus on Chinese workers,
he didn't focus on philanthropy, you know whatever it may be
but I do think by creating the iPad he will have done more
to transform education in this country than a whole lot
of other people who try to, like myself, focus on ed reform.
Now by creating great products that showed the intensity of his ability
to connect beauty with science which is what's going
to make our nation great in the 21st Century.
And if you say well he should have also focuses
on these other things I will remind you we are in the biography tent.
This is not the how-to tent.
These are not management books that say here's how to live your life.
Ben Franklin led his life much differently
than Einstein much differently from Steve Jobs.
Ben Franklin was a great philanthropist
who really brought people together and cared
about you know all the suppliers in America and how they worked.
But he never invented the iPod, iPhone or iPad.
Everybody does something different and the reason I tried
to weave three people together is to say don't try
to just emulate just one person
but realize these are flesh and blood people.
Franklin made mistakes even on tolerance.
He allowed the advertising of slavery in the Pennsylvania Gazette
and at one time had owned a couple of household slaves
which he realized was abhorrent so he freed them.
But he becomes the President of The Society for the Abolition of Slavery
to make up for what he called that errata or error,
so none of these people is perfect.
They all are flesh and blood, that's why in the biography of each one
of them people say why did you put, you know,
their less than savory sides.   Well because they're like us.
Don't try to just copy any one of them.
Realize that biography is understanding our world, our values
and how you might apply them in your life.
>> Thank you.
>> This has been a presentation of The Library of Congress.