Steve Jobs on Education Reform: Vouchers and Great Teachers

Yeah, I'm ready. Okay, you guys ready? Okay, it's April 20th, 1995. This is the Smithsonian interview for Steve Jobs. Okay, I'd like to begin, Steve, with some background biographical information. Tell us about when you were born, where, your parents, your family, those childhood memories. I was born in San Francisco, California, USA, planet Earth, on February 24th, 1955.

I could go into a lot of details of my youth, but I don't know that anybody would really care about that too much. Well, it might in 300 years, because all this print is going to disintegrate. Tell me a little bit about your parents, your family, what are the earliest things you remember? 1955, Eisenhower was still president. Yeah, I don't remember him. But I do remember growing up in sort of the very late 50s, early 60s, a very interesting time in the United States of America. America was sort of at its pinnacle of post-World War II prosperity, I think. And everything had been fairly straight and narrow, from haircuts to culture in every way. And it was just starting to kind of broaden into the 60s, where things were going to start expanding out in new directions.

But it hadn't quite gone that way, and everything was still very successful, very young. America seemed very young and naive in many ways to me, from my memories of that time. So you would have been about five or six years old when John Kennedy was president. Right. I remember John Kennedy being assassinated. I remember the exact moment I heard that he had been shot. Where were you when he was shot? I was walking across the grass of my schoolyard, going home at about three in the afternoon, and somebody yelled out that the president had been shot and killed. And I must have been about seven or eight years old then, I guess. And I knew exactly what it meant.

I also remember very much the Cuban Missile Crisis. I probably didn't sleep for three or four nights, because I was afraid if I went to sleep, I wouldn't wake up. I guess I was about six or seven years old. Again, I understood exactly what was going on. I think everybody did. And it was really a terror that I will never forget in my life, and probably has never really left. And I think that everyone felt it at that time. Oh, yeah. Those of us who are older, I remember being in high school and making plans of where we'd meet if the country was devastated. It was a strange, strange time.

One of the things we're trying to get a handle on is sort of passion and power, and early things that you were passionate about, that you were really interested in. I was very lucky. I had a father named Paul, who was a pretty remarkable man. He never graduated from high school. He joined the Coast Guard in World War II and ferried troops around the world for general patent, I guess. And I think he was always getting into trouble and getting busted down to what's private, I think, is the lowest. But he was a machinist by trade and worked very hard and was kind of a genius with his hands.

And he had a workbench out in the garage where, when I was about five or six, he sectioned off a little piece of it and said, Steve, this is your workbench now. And he gave me some of his smaller tools, showed me how to use a hammer and a saw and how to build things. And it really was very good for me. He spent a lot of time with me teaching me how to build things, take things apart, put things back together. And one of the things that he touched upon was electronics. He did not have a deep understanding of electronics himself, but he'd encountered electronics a lot in automobiles and other things that he would fix.

So he showed me the rudiments of electronics, and I got very interested in that. And then I grew up in Silicon Valley. My parents moved from San Francisco to Mountain View when I was five. My dad had gotten transferred. And that was right in the heart of Silicon Valley. So there were engineers kind of all around. And Silicon Valley at that time was still orchards for the most part. And it was apricot orchards and prune orchards. And it was really paradise. I remember almost every day the air being crystal clear, where you could see from one end of the valley to the other. This was when you were six, seven, eight years old.

Right, exactly. It was really the most wonderful place in the world to grow up. And there was a man that moved in down the street, maybe about six or seven houses down the block, who was new in the neighborhood with his wife. And it turned out he was an engineer at Hewlett-Packard, and he was a ham radio operator and really into electronics. And what he did to get to know the kids on the block was a rather strange thing. He put out a carbon microphone and a battery and a speaker on his driveway, where you could talk into the microphone and your voice would get amplified on the speaker. It's kind of a strange thing to do when you move into a neighborhood, but that's what he did. And I, of course, started messing around with this, and I'd always been taught that you needed an amplifier to amplify the voice of a microphone for it to come out of a speaker.

My father had taught me that. So I went home and proudly announced to my father that he was all wrong and that this man up the block was amplifying voice with just a battery. My father told me I didn't know what I was talking about, and we got into a very large argument about this. And they dragged him down and showed him this, and he himself was a little befuddled. And I got to know this man whose name was Larry Lang, and he taught me a lot of electronics too. He was great. And he used to build Heath kits, which they don't really have anymore, but Heath kits were really great. These Heath kits were these products that you would buy in kit form. You'd pay more money for them than you would if you just went and bought the finished product, if it was available.

But these Heath kits would come with detailed manuals on how to put this thing together, and all the parts would be laid out in a certain way and color-coded, and you'd actually build this thing yourself. And I would say that gave one several things. It gave one an understanding of what was inside a finished product and how it worked, because it would all include a theory of operation. Maybe even more importantly, it gave one the sense that one could build the things that one saw around oneself in the universe. I mean, you see, these things were not mysteries anymore. When you looked at a television set, you would think, well, I haven't built one of those, but I could. There's one of those in the Heath kit catalog, and I built two other Heath kits, so I could build a television set.

Things became much more clear that they were the results of human creation, not these magical things that just appeared in one's environment, and one had no knowledge of their interiors. So it gave one a tremendous degree of self-confidence that through exploration and learning, one could understand seemingly very complex things in one's environment. So, you know, my childhood was very fortunate in that way. I had a rough time in school. It sounds like you were really lucky to have your dad as both the son of a mentor and a hero, and I was going to ask you about school. What was the formal side of your education like?

School was pretty hard for me at the beginning. My mother had taught me how to read before I got to school, and so when I got there, I really just wanted to do two things. I wanted to read books, because I loved reading books, and I wanted to go outside and chase butterflies and do all the things that, you know, five-year-olds like to do. And I encountered authority of a different kind than I'd ever encountered before, and I did not like it. And they really almost got me. They came this close to really beating any curiosity out of me. By the time I was in third grade, I'd had a good buddy of mine, Rick Ferentino, and the only way we had fun was to create mischief. We used to do things like, well, I remember one time we traded everybody.

There was a big bike rack where everybody put their bikes, maybe 100 bikes in this bike rack, and we traded everybody our lock combinations for theirs on an individual basis, and then went out one day and put everybody's lock in everybody else's bike, and it took them until about 10 o'clock that night to get all the bikes unsorted. Stuff like that. We'd set off explosives in teachers' desks and stuff, and it was pretty serious. We got kicked out of school a lot. I encountered one of the other saints in my life, which was, they discovered they were going to put me and this guy, Rick Ferentino, into the same fourth grade class. And the principal said at the last minute, no, no, bad idea, separate them. So this teacher, Mrs. Hill, said, I'll take one of them. And she taught the advanced fourth grade class. And thank God I was the random one that got put in her class.

And she watched me for about two weeks. And she then approached me. She said, Stephen, I'll tell you what, I'll make you a deal. I have this math workbook. And if you take it home and finish it on your own without any help and you bring it back to me, if you get it 80% right, I will give you $5 and one of these really big suckers. She bought it. She held it out in front of me, one of these giant things. And I looked at her like, are you crazy, lady? Nobody's ever done this before. And, of course, I did it. And she basically bribed me back into learning with candy and money. And what was really remarkable was that before very long I had such a respect for her that I sort of reignited my desire to learn.

And she was remarkable. She got me kits for making cameras. I ground my own lens and made a camera. And it was really quite wonderful. And I think I probably learned more academically that one year than I've ever learned in my life. And it created problems, though, because when I got out of fourth grade, they tested me and they decided to put me in high school. And my parents said no. Thank God. They said you can skip one grade, but that's all. But not the high school. But not the high school. And I found skipping one grade to be very troublesome in many ways.

So that was plenty enough. But it did create some problems. I'm going to get myself a little out of order here, but this seems like such a good place to talk about it. Is your experience in that fourth grade class, and do you think that had a major impact on your own interest in education? I mean, if there's any one in the computer industry that's associated with computers and education, it's got to be you and Apple. I'm sure it did, but, you know, I'm a very big believer in equal opportunity as opposed to equal outcome.

I don't believe in equal outcome because, unfortunately, life's not like that, and it would be a pretty boring place if it was. But I really believe in equal opportunity, and equal opportunity to me, more than anything, means a great education. Probably, you know, the second, maybe even more important is a great family life, but I don't know how to do that. Not everybody knows how to do that. But it pains me because we do know how to provide a great education. We really do. If we got our act together, we could make sure that every young child in this country got a great education. And we fall far short of that. And I know from my own education that if I hadn't encountered two or three individuals that spent extra time with me, I'm sure I would have been in jail.

I'm 100% sure if it hadn't have been for Mrs. Hill in fourth grade and a few others, maybe even especially her, I absolutely would have ended up in jail. Because I could see those tendencies in myself to sort of have a certain energy to do something. And it could have been directed to doing something interesting that other people thought was a good idea or doing something interesting that other people maybe didn't like so much. And so, you know, I think when you're young, a little bit of course correction goes a long way. And I think it takes pretty talented people to do that. And I don't know that enough of them get attracted to go into public education.

You can't even support a family on what you get paid. And if you're smart, I sort of feel if somebody's smart enough that you want to turn your kids over to them for the majority of their childhood. I mean the majority of their waking hours in their childhood are spent not with your parents but with your teachers. I'd like the people that are teaching my kids to be good enough that they could get a job at the company I work for making $100,000 a year. Well, why should they work at a school for $35,000, $40,000 a year if they could get a job here at $100,000 a year? I mean, is that an intelligence test? I mean, so I think we should basically be hiring them and paying them $100,000 a year. But the problem there of course is the unions. The unions are the worst thing that ever happened to education.

Because it's not a meritocracy. It turns into a bureaucracy, which is exactly what's happened. And teachers can't teach, and administrators run the place, and nobody can be fired. It's terrible. Some people say that this new technology may be a network world, if you will, may be a way to bypass that. Are you optimistic about that? No, I absolutely don't believe that. And as you pointed out, I've probably helped put more computers in more schools than anybody else in the world up until this point in time. And I'm absolutely convinced that that is by no means the most important thing. The most important thing is another person, another person that incites your curiosity, that guides your curiosity, that feeds your curiosity.

And machines cannot do that in the same way people can. The elements of discovery are around you. You don't need a computer to know, I mean, you know, here. Why does that fall? You know why? Nobody knows why. Nobody in the entire world knows why that falls. We can describe it pretty accurately, but no one knows why. I don't need a computer to get a kid interested in that. To spend a week playing with gravity and trying to understand it and come up with reasons why. But you do need a person. You do need a person. And so, especially with computers the way they are now. The way they are now, computers are very reactive.

But they are not proactive. They are not agents, if you will. They are very reactive. What children need is something much more proactive. And they need a guide. They don't need an assistant. And I think we have the material to solve this problem in the world. It's just being deployed in other places. And I've been a very strong believer that what we need to do in education is go to the full voucher system. I know this isn't what you care about, but this is what I care about a great deal. Well, this is exactly what we care about. Okay, great. Believe it or not, this is at the end.

One of the things that I feel is that right now, if you ask who are the customers of education, the customers of education are the society at large, employers that hire people, things like that. But ultimately, I think the customers are the parents. Not even the students, but the parents. And the problem that we have in this country is that the customers went away. The customers stopped paying attention to their schools for the most part. And gave their kids to the... Well, what happened was that mothers started working. And they didn't have time to spend at PTA meetings and watching their kids' school.

Schools became much more institutionalized. And parents spent less and less and less time involved in their kids' education. And what happens when a customer goes away and a monopoly gets control, which is what's happened in our country, is that the service level almost always goes down. I remember seeing a bumper sticker when the telephone company was all one, AT&T, the Bell system. I remember seeing a bumper sticker with the Bell logo on it. And it said, we don't care. We don't have to. And that's what a monopoly is. That's what IBM was in their day. And that's certainly what the public school system is. They don't have to care.

Now, it turns out... Let's go through some economics. The most expensive thing most people buy in their lives is a house. Second most expensive thing is a car, usually. And a car costs... Average car is approximately about $20,000 now, $16,000, $20,000. And an average car lasts about, what, eight years? You buy another one. So approximately $2,000 a year for an eight-year commitment. Well, your child goes to school, right? Approximately eight years in K-8, right? You don't like to switch schools.

It's about an eight-year commitment. What does the state of California spend per pupil per year? public school. I have no idea. What they spend per year per pupil is about forty four hundred dollars. Wow. Okay? About twice as, over twice as much as a car. Now, it turns out that when you go to buy a car, you have a lot of information available to you to make a choice, and you have a lot of choices. Oh yeah. I mean, General Motors and Ford and Toyota and Chrysler and Nissan, they are advertising at me like crazy. I can't get through a day without seeing five car ads. And they seem to be able to make these cars efficiently enough that they can afford to take some of my money and advertise to other people with it, so that everybody knows all about these cars. And they keep getting better and better and better, because there's a lot of competition. And there's a warranty. And there's a warranty, that's right. But in schools, since people don't feel like they're spending their own money, they feel like it's free, right? No one does any comparison shopping. Matter of fact, if you want to put your kid in a private school, you can't take the $4,400 a year out of the public school and use it. You have to come up with, you know, $5,000 or $6,000 of your own, or even $4,400 of your own money. Sure. Or more. I believe very strongly that if the country gave each parent a voucher, a check for $4,400 that they could only spend at any accredited school, that several things would happen. Number one, schools would start marketing themselves like crazy to parents to get students. Secondly, I think you'd see a lot of new schools

starting. I've suggested as an example, if you go to Stanford Business School, they have a public policy track. They could start a school administrator track. So you could get a bunch of people coming out of college, tying up with somebody who just got out of business school. They could be starting their own schools. Sure. You could have 25-year-old kids out of college, very idealistic, full of energy. Instead of starting a Silicon Valley company, they'd start a school. And I believe they would do far better than many of our public school teachers do. The third thing you'd see is I believe that you would see the quality of schools, again, just like in a competitive market, start to rise. Some schools would go broke. A lot of the public schools would go broke. There's no question about it. It would be rather painful for the first several years. And deservedly so. But I think far less painful than the kids going through the system as it is right now. And some people, the biggest complaint is, of course, that schools would pick off all the good kids and all the bad kids would be left to wallow together in either a private school or the remnants of the public school. To me, that's like saying, well, all the car manufacturers are going to make BMWs and Mercedeses, and nobody's going to make a $10,000 car. Well, I think the most hotly competitive market right now is the $10,000 car area. You've got all the Japanese playing in it. You've got General Motors that spent $5 billion subsidizing Saturn so far so that they can compete in that market. You've got Ford, which has just introduced two new cars in that market. You've got Chrysler with the Neon. So you're spending $32,000 and you're getting a $500 used car in some cases. The market competition model seems to indicate that where there is a need, there is a lot of providers willing to tailor their

products to fit that need and a lot of competition, which keeps forcing them to get better and better. So I think the problems we've got, I used to think when I was in my 20s that technology was the solution to most of the world's problems. And unfortunately, it ain't so. It's sort of, I'll give you an analogy. A lot of times we think, why is television programming so bad? Why are television shows so bad, so demeaning, so poor? And the first thought that occurs to you is, well, there's a conspiracy. The networks are feeding us this slop because it's cheap to produce because of this, because of that. It's the networks that are controlling this and they are feeding us this stuff to try to dumb down the American public. But the truth of the matter, of course, if you studied in any depth, is the networks absolutely want to give people what they want so that they watch the shows. If people wanted something different, they would get it. And the truth of the matter is, the shows that are on television are on television because that's what people want. The majority of the people in this country want to turn on the television and turn off their brain. And that's what they get. And that's far more depressing than a conspiracy. Conspiracies are much more fun than the truth of the matter, which is that a vast majority of the American public are pretty mindless most of the time. I think the school situation is equally, there's a parallel here when it comes to technology. It is so much more hopeful to think that technology

can solve the problems that are really more human and more organizational and more political in nature. And it ain't so. We need to attack these things at the root, which is people and how much freedom we give people, the competition that will attract the best people. Unfortunately, the side effect of pushing out a lot of 46-year-old teachers that lost their spirit 15 years ago and shouldn't be teaching right now. So I feel very strongly about this. And I wish it was as simple as giving every kid a computer, but it won't work. And I'm really glad we had a chance to talk about it up front. Sure. I'm going to change the tape.

Sure. And then I'll go back. I'm sorry? I'm sure the NEA will, like, grab. I wanted to make sure that we got covered. And one of the things was about the books about your life and career. So much has been written about you, rather than go over a lot of those stories. I was going to ask if there are any of those books, or which one do you think is the best and the fairest? And if there are aspects of your career that you think have been left out that you'd like to have addressed? I have to tell you truly, I'm pretty ignorant about that, because I haven't read any of them. I skimmed one one time, and the first page, I skimmed one, maybe read about 10% of it. And I read the first page of another, and it got my birthday wrong by a year.

And I thought, well, if they can't even get this right, then this is probably not worth reading. The one that I skimmed, I don't remember which one it was, but I've always considered part of my job was to keep the quality level of people in the organizations I work with very high. I mean, that's what I consider one of the few things I actually can contribute individually, myself, versus the team that I work with, is to really try to instill in the organization the goal of having only A players. Because in the field that I'm in, like in a lot of fields, the difference between maybe the worst taxi cab driver and the best taxi cab driver to get you across town Manhattan might be two to one. The best one will get you there in 15 minutes, the worst one will get you there in half an hour.

Or the best cook and the worst cook, maybe it's three to one. Pick something like that. Most things in life, the best post person and the worst post person. In the field that I'm in, in software in particular, the difference between the best person and the worst person is about 100 to one or more. The difference between a good software person and a great software person is probably 50 to one, 25 to 50 to one. Huge dynamic range. And therefore, I have found, and not just in software, but in almost everything I've done, it really pays to go after the best people in the world. It's painful. It's very painful when you have some people that are not the best people in the world, and you have to get rid of them.

But I found that my job has sometimes been exactly that, to get rid of some of the people that didn't measure up. And I've always tried to do it in a humane way, but nonetheless, it has to be done and it's not ever fun. Is that the hardest and most painful part of managing a company from your point of view? Oh, sure. Of course. And so, but I've been, you know, at times I've been pretty hard about it. And a lot of times people haven't wanted to leave and I haven't given them any choices. So, if somebody wanted to write a book about me, most of my friends would never talk to them, but they could go find, you know, the handful of a few dozen people that I'd fired in my life that hated my guts. And that was certainly the case in this one book I skimmed. I mean, it was just, let's throw the darts at Steve. And, you know, such is life. I mean, that's sort of the world I've chosen to live in. And if I didn't like that part of it enough, I'd escape and I haven't. So, I'm willing to put up with that. But I certainly didn't find it very accurate.

Okay. Then this gives us a golden opportunity then to let you tell your own story for a while. And I've got a couple of questions I wanted to ask you about, specifically about your experience at Apple. I mean, looking back at the years you were there, what in Your own view, were the accomplishments that you were most proud of, are there a couple of Apple stories that you really like to tell? Oh, Apple was this incredible journey. I mean, we did some amazing things there. The thing that bound us together at Apple was not – it was the ability to make things that were going to change the world.

That was very important to all of us. And we were all pretty young. The average age of the company was mid to late 20s. And we were – hardly anybody had families, certainly at the beginning, and we all worked like maniacs. And the greatest joy was that we felt we were fashioning sort of collective works of art, much like 20th century physics or anything that was – important, that would last, that a lot of people contributed to. And we could actually then, after – you know, very few people could engineer these things, but then they could give them to more people who could, as an example, build an automated factory to build them, and then they could give them to even more people who could use them.

And the amplification factor was very large. I mean, in doing the Macintosh, as an example, there were a core group of less than 100 people that did the Mac, and yet Apple shipped well over 10 million of them. And, of course, everybody's copied it, so if you look at what's really happened, it's in the hundreds of millions at this point in time. That's pretty large amplification, right? You know, a million to one. And it's not often in your life that you get that opportunity to amplify your values a hundred to one – a million to one. And that's really what we were doing. I mean, if you look at what we did, what we tried to do was to say, computation and how it relates to people is really its infancy here. And we are in the right place at the right time to change the course of that vector a little bit.

And what's interesting is if you change the course of a vector near its origin, you know, by the time it gets a few miles out, it's way different. And we were very cognizant of this fact, really from almost the beginning at Apple, that we were, for some incredibly lucky reason, fortunate enough to be at the right place at the right time to do this. And so the contributions that we tried to make embodied values that were not only of technical excellence and innovation, which I think we did certainly our share of, but innovation in a more humanistic way. The things I'm most proud about of Apple are where those two things came together, and I'll give you an example in publishing.

You know, the Macintosh basically revolutionized publishing and printing. And it was because of that typographic artistry coupled with the technical understanding and excellence to implement that electronically. Those two things coming together. Things coming together where people didn't have to understand arcane computer commands to use the computer. So it was a combination of those two things that I am the most proud of. And it happened on the Apple II, and it happened on the Lisa, although there were other problems with the Lisa that caused it to be a market failure. And then it happened again big time with the Macintosh. You used an interesting word when you were describing what you were doing. You were talking about art, not engineering, and not science.

Do you want to talk about that for a minute? Sure. You know, I believe that the distinction between a – we generally use the word artist to mean visual artist of some sort. But I actually think there's really very little distinction between an artist of that type and a scientist or engineer of the highest caliber. And I've never had a distinction in my mind between those two types of people. They've just, to me, been people that pursue different paths. But basically kind of headed to the same goal, which is to express something of what they perceive to be the truth around them so that others can see it, so that others can benefit by it.

And the artistry is in the elegance of the solution, like chess playing or mathematics? No, I think the artistry is in having an insight into what one sees around them, generally putting things together in ways that no one else has, and finding a way to express that to other people who don't have that same insight so that they can get some of the advantage of that insight that makes them feel a certain way or allows them to do a certain thing. And I think that certainly a lot of the folks on the Macintosh team were capable of doing that and did exactly that. And if you study these people a little bit more, what you'll find was, in this particular time, I don't know how it will be in 200 years, but certainly in the 70s and 80s, the best people in computers would have normally been poets and writers and musicians.

I mean, almost all of them were musicians. A lot of them were poets on the side. And they went into computers because it was so compelling, because it was fresh and new, and it was a new medium of expression of their creative talents. And the feelings and the passion that people put into it were completely indistinguishable from a poet or a painter, completely indistinguishable. And I think there was a tremendous amount of... You know, a lot of the people also were fairly shy people or maybe fairly inward people who put a lot of their expression about how they felt about other people or the rest of humanity in general into their work that other people would use.

A lot of people put a lot of love into these products and a lot of expression of their appreciation into these things. It's hard to explain. No, it's passion in the truest sense of the word. So it's... And I don't think this is... This is becoming less true, unfortunately. The computer industry is at a very critical juncture where those people are clearly leaving the field now. What are they doing? Well... Where are they going? It's hard to say. They're not being attracted by something else. They're being driven out of the computer business.

And they're being driven out of the computer business because the computer business is becoming a monopoly with Microsoft. And without getting into whether Microsoft gained this position legally or not, who cares, the end product of the position is that the ability to innovate in the industry is being sucked out dry. And I think the smartest people have already seen some of the writing on the wall and are starting to exit. And I think some of the smartest young people are really questioning whether they're going to even get in. So hopefully things will change over time.

But I think it's kind of a dark, dark period right now. We're entering that. Well, Apple had a reputation as a company that absolutely broke a mold and set its own course. Looking back from where you are today with Next, do you think, with what you know now, that as Apple grew big, it could have sustained that original approach? Or did it have to become a big standard American computer company? Well, that's a funny question. Apple did grow big and sustain that approach. When I left Apple, it was a $2 billion company. I mean, that's not too small. We were a Fortune 300 and something, probably the 350th largest company in the country.

When the Mac was introduced, we were a billion-dollar corporation. So Apple grew from nothing to $2 billion when I was there. That's a pretty high growth rate. And it grew five times since I left, basically on the back of the Macintosh. So I think what's happened since I left in terms of growth rate has been trivial compared with what it was like when I was there. No, what ruined Apple wasn't growth. What ruined Apple was values. John Sculley ruined Apple, and he ruined it by bringing a set of values to the top of Apple which were corrupt, and that corrupted some of the top people that were there, drove out some of the ones that were not corruptible, and brought in more corrupt ones, and paid themselves literally, collectively, tens and tens of millions of dollars, and cared really more about their own glory and wealth than they did about what built Apple in the first place, which was making great computers for people to use.

They didn't care about that anymore, and they didn't have a clue about how to do it, and they didn't take any time to find out because that's not what they cared about. They cared about making a lot of money and so they had this wonderful thing that a lot of very brilliant people made called the Macintosh and they got very greedy and instead of following the original trajectory of the original vision, which was to make this thing an appliance and get this out there to as many people as possible, they went for profits and they made outlandish profits for about four years, one of the most profitable companies in America for four years and what that cost them was their future because what they should have been doing is making rational profits and going for market share, which is what we'd always try to do and Macintosh would have had a 33 percent market share right now, maybe even higher, maybe it would have been Microsoft, but we'll never know and now it's got a single digit market share and falling and there's no way to ever get that moment in time back and the Macintosh will die in another few years and it's really sad and the problem is that the recipe for how to create the next Macintosh, no one at Apple has a clue because no one running any part of Apple was there when the Macintosh was made or any other product at Apple, they've just been living off that one thing now for over a decade and the last attempt was the Newton and you know what happened to that, so it's kind of tragic, but as unemotionally

as I can be, that's what's happening and unless somebody pulls a rabbit out of a hat, these things, companies tend to have long glide slopes because of the installed basis, but Apple's just gliding down this glide slope and they're losing market share every year and things start to spiral once you get under a certain threshold, developers no longer write applications for your computers, so it really starts to spiral down. Sure, well this obviously, I mean there's obviously still a lot of emotional attachment Oh sure, I want Apple to live forever and keep shipping great products forever and I mean Apple could have been a, Apple was for a while like a Sony, it was the place that made the coolest stuff.

Is there a user of Apple or a story that you could tell that in your mind exemplifies what the company stood for and its values at its best? What customers were using the Apple products when you were there? There were two kinds of customers, I mean basically Apple was sort of, there was the educational aspects of Apple and then there was sort of the non-educational and the non-educational side, you know Apple was two things, one it was the first lifestyle computers, I mean Macintosh was the first lifestyle computer, but secondly it really, it's hard to remember how bad it was, you know in the early 1980s, with IBM taking over the world with the PC, with DOS out there, it was far worse than the Apple II, they tried to copy the Apple II and they'd done a pretty bad job and you needed to know a lot and so things were kind of slipping backwards and Macintosh was, you saw the 1984 commercial, I hope you have that in your archives, you know Macintosh was basically this relatively small company, you know in Cupertino, California taking on the Goliath IBM and saying wait a minute, your way is wrong, this is not the way we want computers to go, this is not the legacy we want to leave, this is not what we want our kids to be learning, this is wrong and we are going to show you the right way to do it and here it is, it's called Macintosh and this is so much better that it's going to beat you and we are going to do it

and that's what Apple stood for, was that and that was one of the things, the other thing was you can go a little further back in time and you know Apple II's, one of the things that built Apple was schools buying Apple II's but even so there was, I think only about 10% of the schools that had a computer, even one computer in them in 1979 I think it was and when I grew up I was again lucky because I was in Silicon Valley when I was 12 I think I saw my first computer, 10 or 11, maybe 11 or 12, it was down at NASA Ames and I didn't see the computer I saw a terminal and there was theoretically a computer on the other end of the wire and I fell in love with it and I saw my first desktop computer at Hewlett Packard which was one of their, it was called the 9100A, it was the first desktop computer in the world, ran BASIC and APL I think and I fell in love with them and I thought as we're looking at these statistics in 1979 I thought you know if there was just one computer in every school some of the kids would find it you know, it was just there, someone will find it and it will change their life and we saw the rate at which this was happening and the rate at which the school bureaucracies were deciding to buy a computer for school and it was so slow that we realized that a whole generation of kids was going to go through the school system before they even got their first computer so we thought the kids can't wait for this basically and we wanted to donate a computer to every school in America, turns out there's about 100,000 schools in America,

about 10,000 high schools, about 90,000 K through 8 and we couldn't afford that as a company so we studied the law and it turned out that there was a law already on the books, a national law, that said if you donate a piece of scientific instrumentation or computer to a university for educational and research purposes you can take an extra tax deduction for them, that basically means you don't make any money, you lose some but you don't lose too much, you lose about 10% and we thought if we could apply that law, if we could enhance that law a little bit to extend it down to K through 8 and remove the research requirements, so it just was educational, then we could give 100,000 computers away, one to each school in America and it would cost our company 10 million dollars which was a lot of money to us at that time but it was a lot less than 100 million it would cost us if we didn't have that and we decided we were willing to do that and we actually, it was the most incredible thing, one of the most incredible things I've ever done, we found our local representative, a guy named Pete Stark over in I think it was East Bay and Pete and a few of us sat down and we wrote a bill, we literally drafted a bill to make these changes and we committed, we said if this law changes we will donate 100,000 computers at a cost of 10 million dollars to us

and we called it the kids can't wait bill and Pete Stark introduced it in the House and Senator Danforth introduced it in the Senate and I refused to hire any lobbyists and I went back to Washington myself and I actually walked the halls of Congress for about two weeks and it was the most incredible thing, I met probably two-thirds of the House and over half of the Senate myself and sat down and talked with them and it was very interesting, I found the House members were routinely less intelligent than the Senate members and they were much more knee-jerk to their constituency which I found initially quite offensive but I came to understand that maybe that's a really good idea, maybe that's the way the framers wanted it, they weren't supposed to think too much, they were supposed to represent, maybe the Senators were supposed to think a little more but it was very interesting.

Anyway, the bill passed the House with the largest favorable majority of any tax bill in the history of this country. What happened was it was during Carter's lame duck session and Bob Dole, who was then the Speaker of the House, killed it. He would not bring it to the floor and we ran out of time and so we would have had to have started the entire process over the next year and I gave up. I said this is crazy. However, fortunately something unique happened. California thought this was such a good idea that they came to us and they said you don't have to do a thing, we're going to pass a bill that says since you operate in the state of California, pay California tax, we're going to pass this bill that says if the federal bill doesn't pass then you get the tax break in California, you can do it in California, which there are 10,000 schools.

So we did, we gave away 10,000 computers in the state of California, we got a whole bunch of the software companies, we gave away a bunch of software, we trained teachers for free and we monitored this thing over the next few years, it was phenomenal. It was really phenomenal. And one of my great experiences, but also one of my biggest regrets was that we really tried to do this on the national level and got so close. And I don't think Bob Dole even knew what he was doing, but he really, unfortunately, screwed up here. Yeah, major. Oh, that's a great story. That's a great story. But that's also part of what Apple was about. Now, on the business side, I was at the Washington Post when the Macintosh was introduced. And the Washington Post was an IBM big blue shop, and nobody was going to play with it.

That's right. And the Macintosh infiltrated the Post. There was almost a guerrilla movement. And it started with ad artists, and now the whole front end of the newspaper is being done on Macintosh, Apple machines. On the business side, was that fairly common, this guerrilla cult movement? Yeah, see, we had no concept of how to sell to corporate America, because none of us had ever come from there. I mean, it was like another planet to us. I mean, unfortunately, I've had to learn all that stuff now. And if I'd only known then what I know now, we could have done a lot better. But didn't know that stuff, and didn't have any people that did. So our attempts to sell to corporate America were just bungled.

And we ended up just selling to people that sort of were buying a product for its merit, not because of the company it came from. I mean, everybody was very hooked on big blue back then. And they bought IBM mindlessly, that famous phrase, you never get fired for buying IBM. True. But we fortunately were able to change a lot of that. And Apple, as you know, even I believe today, is a bigger supplier of personal computers than IBM. Great stories. Tell me about Next. What motivated you to establish Next? And what were the goals that you set out to accomplish when you set up this new company? Oh, that's complicated. OK. We basically wanted to keep doing what we were doing at Apple, keep innovating.

And we didn't see that was going to happen. And we made a mistake, which was to try to follow the same metaphor that we did at Apple, to make the whole widget. And the market was changing. The industry was changing. The scale was changing. And in the end, we knew we would sort of be the last company that made it or the first that didn't. We were right on that edge. And we thought we'd be the last one that really made it. But we were wrong. We were the first one that didn't make it. And I think pretty much put an end to the companies that have ever tried to do that. And we certainly made our fair share of mistakes. But in the end, I think we should have took a little longer and realized that the world was changing and just gone to be a software company right off the bat.

But the machine got great reviews. The machine was the best machine in the world. And listen, believe it or not, they're selling on the used market today for, in some cases, more than we sold them for originally. They're hard to find even, even today. And we haven't even made them for two years, two and a half years. What are the features that people will love? Are there features on the old X machine, oh, it's not that old, that are still missing from computers today? Or? Oh, sure. Oh, sure. Well, tell us about it. Ah. Well, first of all, it was a totally plug-and-play machine. Except for Macintosh, that's hard to find. It was an extremely powerful machine, though way beyond the Macintosh. So it sort of combined the power of the workstations with this plug-and-playness of the Mac, which is quite nice.

Second of all, the machine had a fit, sort of a fit and finish that you don't find today. No, I don't just mean in packaging. I mean in sort of operation. Simple things to complex things. Simple things like soft power on and off. I mean, trivial little thing. But as you know, one of the biggest reasons people lose information in computers is they turn them off at the wrong time. And when you get into a multitasking network system, that can happen. That can even have much more severe consequences. So we were the first people to ever do that, still some of the only people to do that, where you push a button and you tell the computer, you request the computer to turn off, it figures out what it needs to do to shut down gracefully and then turns itself off.

Of course, the next computer was the first computer with built-in high quality sound, CD quality sound. And most people do that now, which is great. It took them a long time, but most people do that now. Just ahead of its time. Yeah, just ahead of its time. Change the tape. Ready to roll? Tell me about the Next Step software. What makes it different? What trends does it respond to? That's the real gem. I'll tell you an interesting story. When I was at Apple, a few of my acquaintances said, you really need to go over to Xerox PARC, which was Palo Alto Research Center, P-A-R-C, and see what they've got going over there.

Now, they didn't usually let too many people in, but I was able to get in there and see what they were doing. And I saw their early computer called the Alto, which was a phenomenal computer. Phenomenal computer. And they actually showed me three things there that they had working in 1976. I saw them in 1979. That took really until a few years ago for us to fully recreate, for the industry to fully recreate, in this case with Next Step. However, I didn't see those three things. I only saw the first one, which was so incredible to me that it saturated me.

It blinded me to see the other two. And it took me years to sort of recreate them or rediscover them and incorporate them back into the model. But they were very far ahead in their thinking. They didn't have it right. The stuff they had done was not really right, but it was the germ of the idea of all three things was there. And the three things were graphical user interfaces, object-oriented computing, and networking. Let me go through those. Graphical user interfaces. The Alto had the world's first graphical user interface. It had Windows. It had a crude menu system. It had crude panels and stuff.

No, it didn't work right, but it basically was all there. Objects. They had Smalltalk running. The world's first, or not the first, but really basically the first object-oriented language. Simula was sort of the first, but Smalltalk was the first official object-oriented language. Third, networking. They invented ethernet there, as you know. And they had about 200 Altos with servers hooked up in a local area network there, doing email and everything else over the network, all in 1979. I was so blown away with the potential of the germ of that graphical user interface stuff I saw that I didn't even assimilate or even stick around to investigate fully the other two.

So what Next Step was was the completion of turning some of that vision into a reality, incorporating the world's first truly commercial object-oriented system, Next Step, and really, for its time, being the most networked system in the world when it came out. And I think the world has made a lot of progress in networking, but hasn't yet crossed the hurdle into objects. And what's happened with Next Step is it's really started to get adopted by some very large corporate customers and is now the most popular object-oriented system in the world, as objects are on the threshold of starting to move into the mainstream.

And so the company, last year, recorded its first profit in its nine years history and sold $50 million worth of software. I think we're going to have some significant growth this year. And it's fairly clear that Next can get up to being a few hundred million dollar software company in the next three or four years and be the largest company offering objects until Microsoft comes into the market at some point in time, probably with a pretty half-baked product. Some people say that, in the future, object-oriented software is going to be the only kind of it. Oh, of course. Of course, that's true. I remember being at Xerox in 1979 because it was one of those sort of apocalyptic moments, yeah.

I remember, within 10 minutes of seeing the graphical user interface stuff, just knowing that every computer will work this way someday. It was so obvious once you saw it. It didn't require tremendous intellect. You just looked at it. Of course every computer is going to work this way. This is so clear. The minute you understand objects, it's exactly the same feeling. All software will be written using object-oriented technology someday. You can argue about how long it's going to take, i.e. when. You can argue about who the winner is. There's losers are going to be, but I don't think a rational person can argue about its inevitability. Tell me, give me your thoughts on the current status and the future of the internet and the commercial online services and how they're affecting computer development.

The internet and the World Wide Web, because they've become one thing now, are clearly the most exciting thing going on in computing today. And they're exciting for three or four reasons. Number one, ultimately, computers are turning into communications devices. Ultimately, we're spending more and more of the cycles of the computer to not only make it easy to use, but to make it easy to communicate. And the web is the missing piece of the puzzle, which really is going to power that vision much further forward. So it's very exciting in that way. Secondly, it's very exciting because it is going to destroy vast layers of our economy.

And it is going to make available a presence in the marketplace for very small companies that is equal to very large companies. Let me give you an example. A small three-person company in Phoenix, Arizona can have a web server that looks identical, if not better, than IBM's or than the Gaps or than anybody else, any large company. And they can gain access to this electronic distribution channel for free. They don't have to build buildings. They don't have to go sign up 1,000 distributors and have people to call on them, et cetera, et cetera.

In essence, direct distribution from the manufacturer to the customer via the internet, via the web, direct contact, direct transactions, and then distribution via UPS or Federal Express, that's going to be cheaper than going through all these middlemen or building hundreds of stores around the country. It is going to radically change the way goods and services are discovered, sold, and delivered, not only in this country, but eventually in the world. And as you know, electrons travel at the speed of light. And so it tends to bring the world much closer together in terms of providers and customers. That's very exciting.

The leveling of big and small, the leveling of close, near, and distance. The third reason it's very exciting is because Microsoft doesn't own it. And I don't think they can. I think it's the one thing in the industry that Microsoft probably can never own. And I think one of the things that's essential is that the government can continue to fund the internet as a public trust, as a public facility, and remove any of these ridiculous notions of privatizing it that have been brought up. I don't think they're going to fly, thankfully. The internet costs the US government about $50 to $75 million a year.

This is peanuts for what it's doing right now. And even if that cost someday escalated to half a billion a year, which, of course, you could build the whole internet each year for that from scratch if you had to. You could replace all the equipment, et cetera. That would be an extraordinarily small price to pay for keeping it from getting into the hands of any one company and thereby starting to destroy or control the innovation that could take place around the internet. It's the one last bright spot of hope in the computer industry for some serious innovation to happen at a rapid pace. And what's also great about it is, again, the US is in the forefront here. That's what's great about the whole personal computer and software industry. But this is another example of where the US is in the forefront.

I think it should be kept open. It should be kept free. Yeah, how do you feel about it? I mean, the World Wide Web is literally is becoming a global phenomenon. Yes. Well, are you optimistic about it staying free? Yes, I am optimistic about it staying free. But before you say it's global too fast, it's estimated that over one third of the total internet traffic in the world originates or destines in California. So I actually think this is pretty typical, where California, again, is certainly in the leading edge of this not only technical but cultural shift. And so I do expect the web to be a worldwide phenomenon distributed fairly broadly.

Right now, I think it's a US phenomenon that's moving to be global and, again, very concentrated in certain pockets, California being one. Oh, yeah, well, 85% of the world doesn't have access to a telephone, you have to say. Right. But potential there, and you're pretty optimistic. Tell me about Pixar. Pixar is very interesting. I got hooked up with some folks. Again, a friend of mine told me I should go visit these crazy guys up in San Rafael, California, who were working at Lucasfilm. Now, George Lucas, whom you know, produced the Star Wars film trilogy, was a smart guy. And at one point, when he had a lot of money coming in from these films, realized that he ought to start a technology group.

He had a few problems he wanted to solve. Let me give you an example of one. When you make a copy of an analog audio recording, like a tape cassette to another tape cassette, you pick up noise artifacts, in this case, hiss on the tape. If you make a second generation copy, it gets worse exponentially. The same is true of optical analog copies. If you take a piece of film, make an optical copy, you pick up noise artifacts, in this case, optical noise, which comes across as blurriness in some cases, comes across as other noise artifacts in other cases. Now, George, to make Star Wars, actually had to composite together up to 13 pieces of film for each frame.

The matte paintings for the backgrounds might be a few pieces of film. The models might be a few pieces of film. The live action might be a few pieces of film. Some special effects might be a few pieces of film. And every time he'd make a copy to composite two together, then add a third, then add a fourth, he was adding noise artifacts in each generation. And if you go buy a laser disc of any of the Star Wars movies and you stop it on some of the frames, they are really grungy, incredibly noisy, very bad quality. George, being the perfectionist he was, who figured out how to do this at all, said, I'd like to do it perfectly. I'd like to do it digitally. And nobody had ever done that before. So he hired some very smart people. And they figured out how to do it for him, digitally with no noise artifacts, software and actually built some specialized hardware at the time.

George, at some point, decided that this was costing him several million dollars a year and decided he didn't want to fund it anymore. So I bought this group from George Lucas. And I incorporated it as Pixar. And we set about basically revolutionizing high-end computer graphics. If you look at the 10 most important revolutions in high-end computer graphics in the last 10 years, eight of them have come out of Pixar. All of the software that was used to make Terminator, as an example, to actually construct the images you saw on the screen or Jurassic Park with all the dinosaurs was Pixar software. Industrial Light and Magic uses it as the basis for all of their stuff. But Pixar had another vision than to do special effects.

Pixar's vision was to tell stories, to make real films. And so our vision was to make the world's first animated feature film that was completely computer synthetic, sets, characters, everything. And after 10 years, we have done exactly that. We have developed the tools, which are all proprietary to do this, to manage the production of this thing, as well as the drawing of this thing and the computer synthetic drawing. And we are finishing up making the world's first computer animated feature film. Pixar has written it, directed it, producing it. And the Walt Disney Corporation is distributing it.

And it's coming out this year as Walt Disney's Christmas Picture. It's coming out November 11, I believe. And it's called Toy Story. And you will hear a lot about it, because I think it's going to be the most successful film of this year. Fantastic. It's phenomenal. Tom Hanks is the main character's voice. Tim Allen is the second main character. Randy Newman's doing the music for it. And it's just phenomenal. Well, since this is going to be a bargain for a while, can you tell me a little bit about the story? Yeah, but there's no purpose. In 300 years, they'll have seen it already. That's true. I'm losing my sense of myself. We've got a couple more serious questions, and then I'd like to just give you a chance to say anything else that you wanted to add.

Just back on Pixar again for a minute, though. There's a lot of hoopla now about sort of Hollywood and Silicon Valley converging. They call it Sillywood, I think. Pixar really is going to be the first digital studio in the whole world, and really combines art and technology together in, again, a very wonderful way. Pixar's got, by far and away, the best computer graphics talent in the entire world. And it now has the best animation and artistic talent in the whole world to do these kinds of films. We have the second-largest group of animators in the world now outside of Disney, we think the most talented in the world, working side-by-side with these computer scientists, the best graphics people in the world. And there's really no one else in the world that can do this.

It's really phenomenal. I think we're probably close to 10 years ahead of anybody else. Sounds really exciting. Well, the question I was going to ask, and you partially answered it, was about startup companies. As I look around the facility here and in your literature, there are alliances written all over the walls, literally. Sun and Art, I mean, you're aligned with Hewlett-Packard and Sun and Oracle and Digital and all the systems integrators. Communications companies and information technology companies are merging and becoming one. Do you think that it will ever be possible for a new major startup company to develop if they're going to focus on major applications or software?

Will there ever be another? Yeah, you know, I think yes. Intellectually, sometimes one would say in despair, no, but I think yes. And the reason is because technology keeps on advancing, so there are opportunities. But the thing that makes it possible is that human minds settle into fixed ways of looking at the world. And that's always been true, and it's probably always going to be true. And I think, you know, I've always felt that death is the greatest invention of life. I'm sure that life evolved without death at first and found that without death, life didn't work very well because it didn't make room for the young who didn't know how the world was, you know, 50 years ago, who didn't know how the world was 20 years ago, but who saw it as it is today without any preconceptions and saw and dreamed how it could be based on that, who were not satisfied based on the accomplishments of the last 30 years, but who were dissatisfied because the current state didn't live up to their ideals.

Without death, there would be very little progress. And so one of the things that happens in organizations as well as in people is they settle into ways of looking at the world and become satisfied with those. And the world changes and keeps evolving and new potential arises, but these people that are settled in don't see it. And that's what gives startup companies their greatest advantage is the sedentary point of view of large companies. And in addition to that, large companies usually do not have very efficient communication paths from the people closest to some of these changes at the bottom of the company to the top of the company, which are the people making the big decisions.

And so by the time, there may be people at the lower levels of these companies that see these changes coming, but by the time the word ripples up to the highest levels where they can do something about it, sometimes 10 years passes. And even in the case where part of the company does the right thing at the lower levels, usually the upper levels screw it up somehow. I mean, IBM in the personal computer business was a good example of that. So I think as long as humans don't solve this human nature trait of sort of settling in to a world view after a while, there will always be opportunity for young companies as well as young people to innovate as it should be.

And that was going to be my closing question before I gave you a chance to just sort of reassociate on your own. And that is to talk to young people who sort of look to you as a role model. Opportunities for innovation you think are still possible. What are the factors for success for young people today? What pitfalls should they avoid if you're playing the role of an older statesman? For entrepreneurs? Yeah, for young entrepreneurs. Oh, I get asked this a lot. And I have a pretty standard answer, which is a lot of people come to me and they say, well, I want to be an entrepreneur. And I go, oh, that's great. What's your idea? And they go, well, I don't have one yet. And I say, well, I think you should go get a job as a busboy or something until you find something you're really passionate about because it's a lot of work.

And I'm convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance. It is so hard. You pour so much of your life into this thing. There are such rough moments in time that most people give up. I don't blame them. I mean, it's really tough. And it consumes your life. I mean, if you've got a family and you're in the early days of a company, I can't imagine how one could do it. I'm sure it's been done, but it's rough because it's a pretty much 18-hour-a-day job, seven days a week for a while. So unless you have a lot of passion about this, you're going to not survive. You're going to give it up. So you've got to have an idea or a problem or a wrong that you want to write that you're passionate about.

Otherwise, you're not going to have the perseverance to stick it through. And I think that's half the battle right there. Ah, well, I lied because you're talking made me think of the other side of that. We talked about the passion side. What would you say there's passion and there's power? What would you say about the responsibilities of power once you've achieved a certain level of success? Power? Yeah. What is that? You need passion to build a company like Apple or IBM or any other major company. But once you've achieved, once you've taken a passion to that level and built a company and are in a position like Bill Gates at Microsoft or anybody else, yourself, what are the responsibilities of those who have succeeded and have economic power, social power?

I mean, you've changed the world. What are your responsibilities within that framework or paradigm? Oh, I think, I mean, that question can be taken on many levels. Obviously, if you're running a company, you have responsibilities. But as an individual, I don't think you have responsibilities. I think the work speaks for itself. And I don't think that people have special responsibilities just because they've done something that other people like or don't like or what have you. I think the work speaks for itself. I think people can choose to do things if they want to.

But, you know, I mean, we're all going to be dead soon. That's my point of view. Somebody once told me, they said, live each day as if it will be your last and one day you'll certainly be right. And I do that. And I really, you never know when you're going to go, but you know you are going to go pretty soon. And what, you know, if you're going to leave anything behind, you know, it's going to be, you know, your kids, a few friends and your work, right? So that's what I tend to worry about. I don't tend to think about responsibility. Matter of fact, I tend to like to, on occasion, pretend I don't have any responsibilities.

I try to remember the last day when I didn't have anything to do and I had nothing to do the following day that I had to do. I had no responsibilities and it was, you know, decades ago. So I have to pretend when I want to feel that way. So I don't think in those terms. I think you have a responsibility to do really good stuff and get it out there for people to use and let them build on the shoulders of it and keep making better stuff. Some of the responsibilities to yourself and to your own standards and... Well, in our business, you know, one person can't do anything anymore, but you create a team of people around you and you have a responsibility of integrity of the work to that team. Everybody does and you try to turn out the best work you can. Any final comments or thoughts, either for the record or off the record?

No, not really. Time frame is an interesting thing when you think about people, you know, looking back. I do think when people look back on this in a hundred years, they're going to see this as a remarkable time in history. Incredibly, and especially this area, believe it or not. I mean, I think when you look at the innovation that's come out of this area, just this Bay Area, Silicon Valley and the whole San Francisco, Berkeley, Bay Area, you know, you've got the invention of the integrated circuit, the invention of the microprocessor. The invention of semiconductor memory, certainly the invention of the modern hard disk drive. The invention of the modern floppy disk drive. Those were invented at IBM, the hard disk and the floppy disk.

But the commercialization of those things. The invention of the personal computer. The invention of genetic engineering. The invention of object-oriented technology. The invention of graphical user interfaces at PARC, followed by Apple. The invention of networking. All that happened in this Bay Area. Isn't that incredible? Yeah. Why do you think it happened? Why here? Why here? This place, this area. Two or three reasons. This place is a remarkable place, actually. I mean, you have to go back a little bit in history. I mean, this is where the beatnik era happened, you know, San Francisco. It was a pretty interesting thing. This is where the hippie movement happened.

This is the only place in America where rock and roll really happened. Right? It's all the bands. I mean, most of the bands in this country, outside of Bob Dylan in the 60s, I mean, they all came out of here. Everything from Joan Baez to Jefferson Airplane to The Grateful Dead. I mean, everything came out of here. Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix. Everybody. Why is that? That's a little strange when you think about it. And then you've also had Stanford and Berkeley, two awesome universities, drawing smart people from all over the world and depositing them in this clean, sunny, nice place where there's a whole bunch of other smart people and pretty good food.

Right? And, you know, at times a lot of drugs and a lot of fun things to do. So they stayed. And so there's a lot of human capital pouring in here. Right? A lot of human capital. Really smart people. The average, you know, people seem pretty bright here relative to the rest of the country. And people seem pretty open-minded here relative to the rest of the country. And I think it's just a very unique place. And I think it's got the track record to prove it. So that tends to attract more people, too. And I give a lot of credit to the universities. Probably the most credit of anything to Stanford and Berkeley, UC Cal.

Yeah. That's great. Thanks. Well, I cannot tell you how much we appreciate this. Sure, I hope it's helpful. Oh, and it will be. We'll give you a copy of this. Well, I just did David Packard yesterday.