The Legacy of Steve Jobs, at Code 2022

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Kara Swisher: Hi, everyone. This is Kara Swisher. Today, we've got another bonus episode. It's the finale to our Code episodes, my conversation with Tim Cook, Sir Jony Ive, and Laurene Powell Jobs on the legacy of Steve Jobs. If you like this interview—and you obviously will, because it's a good one—then I've got some good news. I have a new interview show. It's called *On with Kara Swisher*, and it launches in late September, which is very soon. Go to wherever you get your podcasts, search for *On with Kara Swisher*, and hit follow. Enjoy.

[The interview begins]

Kara Swisher: So this is the last session. I thought it would be a good one to bring in the CEO of the most valuable company in the world and talk about the man who was there at the beginning of it, Steve Jobs, along with many others, of course. Tim Cook was there very early. But I wanted to bring in the key people who were involved. The very first person to be interviewed at Code—it was called All Things D—was Steve Jobs. He really made our conference by coming and actually engaging.

Everyone has their versions of Steve Jobs. I have a version. At one point, someone said, "Oh, he's heartless." I said, "He was all heart." That's why he was the way he was. It was all passion and everything else. One of the things I really appreciated with him is he really was the most famous tech person in the world. I think he still almost remains that. He came and engaged with us. We argued. We had lots of different disputes. But he always came and he talked about issues. One of the things that I thought was very important was that he was incredibly prescient about things that would happen.

So I thought I would get together a group of people around privacy, around care of design, around anticipation of consequences. I wanted to get the people who knew him. There are lots of people who knew him well. These people really knew him well and were really important to the growth of Apple, to what it is today. I wanted to get their impressions of what he would have thought about the current moment and where we're going, and maybe just have a few stories.

I know Apple had an event today. If you want to ask about the fucking iPhone, I don't care. It's iPhone 14, okay? And it's got something called Dynamic Island. I don't know. I'll buy one. It's fine. But I really do want to focus this conversation on Steve Jobs, his legacy, and where we're going—how we can show more care and bring that idea that Steve brought, which was about art and tech coming together.

So let's bring out our panel.

[Guests join the stage]

Kara Swisher: Good to see you. Thank you for flying up. I heard you were busy today.

Tim Cook: It was a fun day. It was exciting.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, good, good. You'll explain Dynamic Island to me later. I don't understand. It's a great name. It feels like it should be a reality show. Nonetheless, I want to focus on Steve right now. Obviously, these people need no introductions. This is Laurene and Jony, all well known for being such an important part of this journey.

So let's talk about the current moment. I would love each of you to reflect on—you can't guess what he was going to think or anything else—but what Steve would think of the current moment in your estimation. Again, we don't know, obviously. Tim, why don't we start with you?

Tim Cook: The current moment at Apple or the current moment in the world?

Kara Swisher: In the world, at Apple?

Tim Cook: Well, I think at Apple, I believe and hope that he would be proud over a day like this, where we bring out a lot of innovations that are very much on the principles that he laid out and articulated so well. I think the greater world, he would be troubled by a lot of things that he sees—the partisanship and the division in the world. But I think he would be happy that we're living up to the values that he talked about so much, like privacy, like protecting the environment. These were core to him while we're keeping up innovation and trying to give people something that enables them to do something they couldn't do otherwise, to give them tools to discover their own self and to change the world in their own way.

I think it would be mixed. And I hate to project what he would think today. I really don't like to do that. But I think there are lots of challenges in the world today.

Kara Swisher: Laurene?

Laurene Powell Jobs: It's true that it's an impossible hypothetical. But because we knew him so very well for a long time, in many ways, he inhabits each of us. For me, often the way I make sense of the world, I have the resonance of his voice in my head often.

He would be very disappointed with the political climate, I would say. Not only the polarization, not only the fact that people are really coming to blows within families and communities and our country, but also just that he loved our country so much. He loved California so much, but he loved our country. He loved the idea of America. He loved what it allowed the individual and the communities to become. He loved the unfetteredness of it. He loved the personal freedoms and liberties, but also the connectedness and responsibility for each other. It was very important to him to be able to give something back to the human experience. I think he would not be quiet about the current...

Kara Swisher: Would he be on Twitter?

Laurene Powell Jobs: No.

Kara Swisher: Would he be on Twitter?

Laurene Powell Jobs: No. He wasn't a big fan of social media, mainly because of the business model. But he would not be on Twitter. No, he would be speaking out easily and often.

Kara Swisher: His emails and letters were like tweets, though. They were short and kind of sweet. I remember when you introduced Ping.

Tim Cook: Ping?

Kara Swisher: Ping. That was some social network.

Tim Cook: Yeah.

Kara Swisher: He came out of the room after he gives a speech in the room where people are looking at things. He came out and he goes, "What do you think?" I said, "I think it sucks." And he goes, "I think so." Right away. And he goes, "I hate social media," which was interesting. It wasn't because he wasn't social or anything like that. He just couldn't figure it out.

Jony, what do you think? Not on that particular Ping, because it did suck. But go ahead.

Jony Ive: It's certainly disappointing. I actually don't know. I could imagine him being mad slash furious, but also combined with that sort of compassion and love for the ideals that Laurene described. I think both of those are fabulous fuels to be effective. I think he would have brought his curiosity and lack of fear to have ideas. But I think certainly would have felt that there's an imperative here.

You know when he used to talk about it's important that you find what it is you love. I used to think that was because it's nice to feel warm in your tummy. He actually described that as being because if you're going to do something that's really hard, you need that sort of fuel. And fury and love, I think, are wonderful fuels. I would expect they would be a mixture of both.

Kara Swisher: Talk a little bit about one of the things that he did. It gets tension now and again, his quotes. It was at a Code conference or an All Things D conference about privacy. That was something he talked about very clearly, plain English and everything else. Where do you think—this is something you've done at Apple a lot. It's been a big core value to the company. It's been good for market. People feel safer on it. It's good for sales. Talk a little bit about the issues around privacy now, how you're looking at it.

Tim Cook: Steve really ingrained in the company in the early days the importance of privacy. It has only grown with every year that has passed since then. He saw—I think it was at D8 that he spoke about privacy here in 2010, I think it was. And he put it in such eloquent and simple terms. It means asking people's permission, asking them repeatedly. It has been at the heart of how we view privacy.

We believe that privacy is a fundamental human right. We see a world where privacy takes a back seat and you have this sort of surveillance kind of mode everywhere. That is a world where people begin to do less and think less. They begin to alter their behavior because they know they're being watched. This is not a world that any of us want to live in. I think he saw that and saw that well. I have every reason to believe that he would have put up good arguments and good fights along the way.

Kara Swisher: Which you have been attempting to do in lots of ways, whether it's around advertising or anything else.

Tim Cook: What we felt is that people should own their data and they should make their own decision. We believed that people should be empowered to be able to make that decision in a straightforward and simple manner, not buried 95 pages deep in a privacy policy somewhere. That's the way that we've looked at it. We continue, as each year goes by, to try to give our users the power to make those decisions for themselves. You see the features that we've rolled out over time that do that. We are not trying to make the decision for them.

Kara Swisher: Well, you have by de facto become, because of this core value of this company started by Steve, you've become the de facto regulator in that regard because regulators haven't stepped in.

Tim Cook: We're not trying to be a regulator, Kara. All we're trying to do is give people the ability to make the decision for themselves. Do they want to be tracked? Is this something that they are freely making the decision to do? We're presenting them the ability to make that decision. We just keep trying to do that more and more as time goes on.

Kara Swisher: Jony, we were talking earlier about care, when we talked earlier this week about care and design. That's another thing because a lot of the stuff that's been rolled out that have been privacy violations have been rolled out without care. Without consequences, without intentionality, or just lack of caring about the consequences. Talk a little bit about the idea of care and design.

Jony Ive: I think care is a tough word in some ways to understand. I think it's easier to understand carelessness, which is a disregard for people. Carelessness to me is just seeing people as a potential revenue stream, not the reason to work moderately hard to really express your love and appreciation for the rest of the species.

For us in our practice of design, I think care is very often felt and not necessarily seen. I know it's something that I think the three of us feel strongly about. Steve talks about the carpenter, the cabinet maker that would finish the back of the drawer. You're bothered beyond whether something is actually publicly seen. You do it not because there's an economic interest. You do it because it's the right moral decision.

I think particularly as a designer, it's very often in the very small, quiet things—like worrying about how you package a cable. You clearly worry about that a lot. I worry about that ever such a lot. Steve worried about that a lot as well. That preoccupation—when you're sat there on a Sunday afternoon worrying about the power cable that's packaged as a zig-zag thing, and you're going to take that little wire tie off. When you're sat there on a Sunday afternoon worrying about this isn't really very good, the only reason you are there is because our species deserves better. It deserves some thought. It's a lovely way of feeling connected.

Kara Swisher: I remember once Walt came back from visiting him when Microsoft made their—what was it? The Zune?

Tim Cook: The Zune.

Kara Swisher: The Zune. Yeah. I have a vague memory of it. It was a Microsoft version of the iPod, really. Walt had not seen it and Steve handed it to him. Walt handed it to him and he went like this. [Gestures dramatically] Very dramatic, very Steve. He goes, "I cannot touch that. It's disgusting." He was doing it for Walt's benefit, but he was repulsed by the design. He was repulsed by what it was. Whether it worked or not, I don't care.

Talk about this idea of care around creation. You're doing a whole lot of different things now, but the idea of that seemed to be something that mattered. Some people thought it was niggling details, fastidiousness, whatever it was. How do you look at that?

Laurene Powell Jobs: Steve early on in his life developed a very full aesthetic sense, certainly before I did. He noticed details of everything—the way that the floor meets the walls, meets the ceilings, the way that the lights are either recessed or not recessed, whether or not the sconce design allows for the kind of illumination that it's meant for. All things like that. He was very much aware of both the physical and the natural environment. He was animated by the natural environment as well.

As I mentioned, he loved California. He really loved California. He loved the natural beauty and the light of it and the sense of openness and possibility. I think that allowed him to have a much broader sense of what his life could be as well. People made fun of us for years because in our house, we couldn't agree on a sofa or chairs. So for many years, we had neither. Mainly because there were so many details that we had to agree on.

Kara Swisher: And you finally did?

Laurene Powell Jobs: Yeah.

Kara Swisher: But I think it took about eight years.

Laurene Powell Jobs: Oh, wow.

Kara Swisher: It wasn't just a thing. I don't like couches. There's a lot of pictures of them without couches.

Laurene Powell Jobs: Yeah, but that was a real thing.

Kara Swisher: So one of the things was the idea of how to wield power, Tim. Under your leadership, since you took over, Apple has become enormous. It was a much smaller company when Steve was running it. How do you look at that idea? One of the things that Apple is undergoing now—all of tech is going to do scrutiny around power, about the power that these companies have over people. I'd love you to reflect on the idea of what the concepts were at the beginning. One of the things Steve did was push against power—that famous ad, obviously. He talked about it a lot. He didn't seem to like power. But now this is probably the most powerful company in tech, or one of them.

Tim Cook: We don't think in those terms. That's not how we think. We think about our values and we think about using any platform that we might have to expand those values. We just talked about privacy, but environment is another one. We touch a lot of companies around the world because we manufacture things. We know that we have a responsibility to convince those companies to use renewable energy, to recycle, to do things that are sustainable. That's the lens that we look at it through, not the lens of power and wielding it.

Kara Swisher: In a lot of ways, the company is still run the way Steve set it up. How would you describe that?

Tim Cook: It's still a functional-based company. We don't have these many P&Ls where people fight about what costs are allocated to which P&L and those sorts of things. We have one for the company. We have someone that owns software and someone that owns hardware and someone that owns technology and someone that owns design. It's a great partnership and collaboration. It was something that he demanded of people—this idea of collaboration and the idea that small teams could do incredible things together.

He ran a meeting every Monday, Jony will remember this well, at 9 o'clock. No matter where you were, you were in that meeting at 9 o'clock on Monday. He would get the top people of the company together and we'd go through everything in the company that was key. We still run that same meeting on that same day at that same time. A lot of the things that he brought that aren't talked about very much, they live on in terms of the principles that he utilized.

We don't sit around and say, "What would Steve do?" He told us not to do that. But the reality is that he was the best teacher I've ever had by far. Those teachings live on. Not just in me, because it's in a whole bunch of people that are there.

Kara Swisher: Give me a few of those teachings from your perspective.

Tim Cook: He was always on that Apple should make the best products, not the most. Looking at things from that lens changes everything. Sometimes those two align and the best is the most. But many times it doesn't. Many times it won't because products become commoditized over time in certain fields, like the personal computer business. We've never set a goal to make the most personal computers. We make the Mac and we love what the Mac does. It's the best. We can be proud that it's the best.

He had a view that he really drilled in me that Apple should own its primary technologies. That thinking led us to go into the processor business for the Mac, first on the iPhone.

Kara Swisher: Which means not buy Intel chips or whatever.

Tim Cook: Right. It did mean that because it's a very core technology. He believed that you should own the customer experience in total. The way that a customer felt drove him significantly. He wanted to delight people. You heard on the video—and this happened thousands of times—where he would get notes from somebody that he doesn't know. They would talk about getting our product and finding out that it did X and Y that they didn't even know that it did. Maybe it was years after they had initially bought the product. These are still deeply embedded into the company.

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Kara Swisher: We'll be back in a moment with more from Tim Cook, Sir Jony Ive, and Laurene Powell Jobs at Code.

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Kara Swisher: We're back. Now more from Code.

One of you talked about the Nano. Was it the Nano? That became big, right? He was surprised, correct?

Jony Ive: I remember we were chatting about this over lunch. I can't remember which generation of the Nano it was, but he was so surprised to be directly touching people. I was so struck that he'd always assumed vicariously his work, Apple's work, would have enormous influence. This was suddenly the volumes of this product, the fact that it was literally directly touching people, thrilled him. Not because that was a goal—huge volume—but to be so relevant with something that we poured so much care into.

Kara Swisher: So the idea that—but he still liked that it was not just impactful, but the good business, presumably?

Jony Ive: We never talked about the business stuff.

Kara Swisher: Never?

Jony Ive: Not really.

Kara Swisher: What did you talk about?

Jony Ive: I told you, like hanking cables.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jony Ive: We talked about a lot of stuff that was really about how we saw the world. Actually, it was interesting seeing that clip of Bill and Steve when Bill said that he was jealous of Steve's taste. I don't think that meant Bill was jealous of the way Steve chose his sneakers. I think it was that there was something beautiful about the way that Steve thought and about the way he perceived things and the way he saw the world.

Laurene and I were chatting about this. There was such intention in Steve's thinking. There was such rigor. I've never met somebody so curious and so inquisitive. His curiosity wasn't casual or passive. It was ferocious. It was restless. But it was intentional.

Kara Swisher: Talk about that. You were just nodding.

Laurene Powell Jobs: I was thinking about when Steve came back to Apple. Tim would probably know how many product lines there actually were and how many products there were—in the 30s or 40s.

Tim Cook: Too many. Way too many.

Laurene Powell Jobs: So many. And they were, of course, running out of money. He clarified, went around and talked to everyone, and then clarified and justified the product line to be a two-by-two matrix and narrowed it down to four things. That meant he had to use incredibly disciplined decision-making and focus. But he also was very much driven by keeping the company in business. At that point, he was very concerned about the business and used that very much as a yardstick.

Something else that Steve often talked about was the power of saying no. Not no to bad ideas, but no to great ideas. No to ideas that you desperately wish to follow through on, but they actually don't fit in that discipline.

Kara Swisher: Everyone was just talking about some of his ideas. He can't do them for various reasons. Find the discipline in them. Keep going with that idea—the idea that you just don't do them.

Laurene Powell Jobs: That speaks to the clarity of his thinking and the crispness of his thinking, as well as his desire to make those four things the best on the planet. He often talked about leaving behind a body of work the way that an artist does. When you want to have a body of work, you want it to be great.

Kara Swisher: Talk about that idea of creativity. One of the things he talked about a lot when we talked was about mixing the art and the commerce and the technology, which I think has been lost rather significantly. I'd love it from your perspective, Tim. When you think about what you're making now, how hard is it to marry those things without the person who talked about them all the time?

Tim Cook: Steve's vision for Apple was always to stand at the intersection of the liberal arts and technology. We've always tried to stay in that spot and always think about the humanity—the person behind the product, the person that's using the product—and have the technology recede into the background. Time and time again, he showed that he was doing that. He would make bold decisions on focus.

As witnessed by—I think he even shared on one of these stages—that he initially was going to work on a tablet when he saw multi-touch and decided, "No, this could be a phone." The phone was more important than the tablet. He took what was arguably a great idea and shelved it for years. This was not a delay of a couple weeks or a year. This was multiple years. People love the iPad, so delaying it for the phone...

Kara Swisher: He did lie about the phone on stage to us absolutely directly. And then laughed about it the next year. We go, "Did you lie to us?" He goes, "I did."

Tim Cook: I think initially Steve was very concerned that Apple could not control the product—

Kara Swisher: The orifice thing.

Tim Cook: —in a way that would make it the best product. He was worried that the carrier's head would direct the design of the product. He was very worried that that would wind up being a product that Apple should not be doing. It was not until he saw a way to change that that he became a huge proponent of Apple in the phone business.

Kara Swisher: He did on stage at All Things D, he said, "I don't like crawling through orifices," which we were like, "Lovely."

Tim Cook: Yeah.

Kara Swisher: I was just wording it a little differently.

Tim Cook: Yeah, right.

Kara Swisher: He was talking about phone companies. One of the things that was interesting about it was getting control of that. Bob Iger talked about that—getting control of content, getting control of things that had been in powerful positions that prevented you from making things at that time, as I recall.

When you think about that, Jony, one of the things was design, the freedom of design. How do you look at current design right now of things compared to what you were making? I know you're working on a range of things. You can't talk about everything you're making. But how do you look at what's happened to design?

Jony Ive: That's so curious. I think we're so preoccupied with what we're wrestling with that that's fairly all-consuming. I think the problems, the challenges remain the same. I do think that there are fabulous affordances with interfaces like multi-touch. But we do remain physical beings. I do think that there are opportunities. Sometimes I think the pendulum may swing a little to have interfaces and products that are more tactile and more engaging physically.

Obviously the winds are substantial to have the ability to have an interface that is app-specific. I think there are examples where the interface is being driven inappropriately by something like multi-touch.

Kara Swisher: Like cars.

Jony Ive: For example.

Kara Swisher: What would a car you design look like?

Jony Ive: You know I can't talk to you about that.

Kara Swisher: I could ask the same. What would a car you design look like?

Jony Ive: Oh, yeah, that's a good question for me. I'm not a car person, really. I love beautiful old ones that are no longer safe to drive. I find most ledger cars soulless. I find them soulless. That's why I can't buy one yet.

Kara Swisher: I know you guys don't love the design of Tesla, but I appreciate the degree of its safety. It's really quite nice.

Laurene Powell Jobs: I would like to come back to your previous question if I may. Something that Steve always took great pride in was being surrounded by artists and poets and musicians. That has to do with design. You design who you're with. You find diversity of thought and it brings out something different in you. It's what Tim was talking about—residing in that intersection of liberal arts or humanities and technology.

Silicon Valley has always been a place where people came with big ideas and wanted to come and do great things. I hope that they're still remembering that we actually need some poetry and romance in what comes out of there.

Kara Swisher: I think that it's much less than it used to be.

Jony Ive: His understanding and reverence for the creative process was extraordinary. Tim and I learned so much just going through the process with Steve. The way the process tended to work was there was thinking—being intentional about your thinking, being very self-aware. From your thinking, ideas emerge. Tim and I talked so much about the nature of ideas. Ideas are fragile. They're not resolved. If they were resolved, there wouldn't be ideas, there'd be products.

One of the huge challenges, particularly amongst large groups, is that when you're talking about an idea, often the thing that is easiest to talk about, that is measurable, that's tangible, are the problems. He was masterful at helping people not ignore the problems, but to remain focused upon the promise, the vision of the actual idea. There was that wonderful reverence for the creative process. If you're being expected to produce an idea and you know the ideas don't oblige—you can't predict when you're going to have a good idea—you tend to need to focus on process and the discipline of trying to increase the probability of a good idea.

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Kara Swisher: We'll be back after another quick break.

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Kara Swisher: We're back. Now more from my conversation with Tim Cook, Sir Jony Ive, and Laurene Powell Jobs.

As I was thinking about this, one of the things that I have felt over the many years is that Steve was not an easy subject. He had a lot of edges to him. But it was more around passion, and it was more around being difficult for a good reason. Sometimes he looks so calm in comparison to today's moguls. He'd park his car somewhere weird, and that was the biggest controversy of the moment. He didn't tweet penis jokes at the president or something like that. So what? He drove his car. I don't care. At this point, it seems very benign, some of the stuff he was doing.

But one of the things I was thinking about is this idea you're talking about—why you're making something to be beautiful for ideas. It's been replaced by a rapaciousness. It just has. There's no beauty in it. It's soulless. It doesn't feel soaring.

How do you think about that, Tim, in terms of keeping that there? Because there is the pressure for earnings, there's pressure for things. You and I talked about that in one of our interviews when I—and you don't have to talk about specific people, we're talking about Mark Zuckerberg at that time. I said, "What would you have done?" And you said, "I wouldn't be in this place in the first place." Broader than that, how did we get in this place in the first place?

Kara Swisher: Because I do think the death of Steve Jobs sort of changed something in the atmosphere. And people that rose up, you know, for all his flaws were not up to his speed. I don't, maybe you don't agree with me on that.

Tim Cook: I think Silicon Valley is not monolithic. And so it's not monolithic. And so I think it's hard to paint everything with one roller. Although people revered him more than anybody as a...

Kara Swisher: Oh, I revere him, as you know.

Tim Cook: And so I think he's a measuring stick that when you compare most people to are always going to fall short of. And that's great. He was a one in a century plus kind of person, I think. And in most every way. And he was also demanding and he was passionate about his point. And he believed that you get a better answer by debating. And so a lot of what people might not understand about him was he would debate just to get the subject going, sometimes taking a position that he didn't even believe. And just to get the discussion going because he was so convinced if you examine this thing from outside and in a deep kind of way, in a very thoughtful kind of way, you would arrive at a better decision. And I think that's something that not just founders, but everyone can learn from. And I think getting the learnings from him moving forward is something that is very important. Because I do think that he was one in a gazillion kind of thing. And certainly from my point of view, he changed the trajectory of my life. And I can't imagine learning from anyone else the amount that I learned from him. It was a daily kind of thing. He demanded innovation everywhere. Obviously, he demanded in products, but he demanded that marketing be innovative. He demanded that operations be innovative. He wanted every single thing in the company to be the best. And he had the examination ability with his thinking to go very deep on almost everything in the company. It was a very unusual skill set that he had. And so I think we can all learn from that in our own lives, both personal lives and in business.

Kara Swisher: Well, the debating thing is interesting because I do think one of the things, someone was asking me what the problem is. And I'm like, they're surrounded by people who get, they pay, they own, and they don't have anyone disagreeing with them. There's no disagreement. There's no debate. Everyone is in violent agreement together. And then they feel victimized as a group. Where there was always debate with him.

Tim Cook: There was always debate. I know there was a folklore that you didn't debate him. That's not true. In fact, if you didn't debate him, he would kind of mow you down. And he did not work well with those kind of folks that would not feel comfortable in debating and pushing back. And it was a very different environment for me because I came out of an environment that was more hierarchical in nature. And you sort of, each person agreed with the higher level person before you entered a room and there was no debate and no discussion.

Kara Swisher: What was your greatest debate with him over?

Tim Cook: Probably the way the initial iPhone was sold.

Kara Swisher: What was your side?

Tim Cook: I was for putting it in the subsidy model. And he was for the rev share. And his way was more creative and more different. My way would have scaled faster. At least I felt strongly. And so we were in quite a discussion about this for a while. It was a multi-year discussion.

Kara Swisher: What about you, Laurene? What was the debate you would have as partners?

Laurene Powell Jobs: What was the debate I would have with Steve? Besides the couch, clearly. No, we were together for 22 years. So pick your month and we'd debate it.

Kara Swisher: So I want to finish up talking a little bit about some things you're going to do. Would you want to talk about the archive or not?

Laurene Powell Jobs: Oh, yes. Go ahead. Yes. So what Kara's alluding to is a group of us, the three of us, and others who worked with Steve over the years came together as advisors, and we have a lead historian and archivist in a small group that has established the Steve Jobs Archive. And while we do have some artifacts and some actual real material, the archive is much more about ideas, as Jony was describing, and really rooted in Steve's long-held notion that once you understand that outside of the natural world, everything in the built environment and all the systems that govern our life on the planet were built and designed by other humans. And once you have that insight, you understand that you as a human can change it, can prod it, can interrogate it and stretch it. And in that way, human progress happens. So he would reference the fact that everything that you're born into, the design of everything around you, the clothes that you wear, all of these decisions were made by someone else and the actual artifacts were made by someone else. And so as humans, we have a responsibility to put things back into that pool of human existence in a way that benefits all and that moves things forward and thereby we have human progress.

Kara Swisher: So what is in the archive, this idea of?

Laurene Powell Jobs: Well, the archive has a website, Steve Jobs Archive, and then there will be some programs that we have. There will be other products that I won't speak about at the moment. There's a lot of, over the years, very carefully, a very brilliant documentary filmmaker has interviewed hundreds of people who have reminiscence, memories, experiences, really beautiful stories to tell about Steve and working with Steve. And so we've collected that as well. There's also a lovely body of stuff that's just Steve, that it's not somebody's interpretation of. I think one of the things that we thought was so powerful about that was that you actually started to get a sense of how he did see the world. It's not somebody trying to make sense of something he said or a way he behaved. You get to see a little note that he scratched or a way he annotated an email or a presentation. But when you see something directly you start to get a sense of what he was thinking and why, and you realize how much he's lost, don't you, when somebody else tries to make sense of someone's behavior.

Kara Swisher: So what would he be doing now? My last question. We have a Zoom question from someone I know. What would he be doing now if he had lived? What do you imagine he'd be working on? Just guess.

Tim Cook: Oh, I wouldn't want to guess. I think Steve was constantly changing. And so he wasn't static. He would take a firmly held belief and presented with new facts would change like this. It was one of the great things I admired about him, he would be dogmatic about something, presented something else like this, change. And I think that is such a great characteristic of people because people get held back by their old thinking, regardless of what new thoughts and ideas come up, and he never did. And so, I knew what he was thinking in 2010 and 2011 and before, but what he would be thinking about today, I wouldn't want to hazard a guess. He would be evolving.

Laurene Powell Jobs: He also was quite mindful about having, not staying too long at the helm and making space for others. He did have a fantasy of teaching eventually.

Kara Swisher: Wow.

Laurene Powell Jobs: And because we live right near Stanford, that notion of riding the bike to Stanford and teaching classes there was a very...

Kara Swisher: Professor Steve Jobs. Yes, exactly. What did he want to teach?

Laurene Powell Jobs: Oh, well, I mean, I think he could teach almost anything and people would really benefit from it. Not driving.

Jony Ive: Go ahead. Actually, I couldn't agree more. I think part of curiosity, which I think defines so much of Steve, is your appetite to learn. And to learn is more important than being right. I think that goes towards him, which is, you can present with passion a perspective or a point of view. But you're doing that not to win an argument. You're doing it just to try and understand. And I think there's something so pure about that appetite just to learn, because it makes you question the motivation. And the motivation is not to win arguments. The motivation is to be able to do better work. And I always loved how clear he was about a bunch of stuff can be consequential to doing better work, like disruption. Disruption was never one of our goals, was it? It happened to be a consequence of just trying to do something better. But not a goal.

Tim Cook: But not a goal.

Jony Ive: Or a company motto, for example. Stuff like that.

Kara Swisher: All right. We have a question from Zoom. First, go.

Walt Mossberg: Hi, guys.

Kara Swisher: Hi, Walt.

Walt Mossberg: Hi. So, you know, I spent, for a journalist, for an outsider, I spent many, many hours talking to him. We would have half an hour interview schedule that would wind up being two and a half hours. We'd go far beyond whatever he wanted to show me or whatever I wanted to ask him, covering a lot of the fields that you're talking about beyond just what Apple was doing. But one thing he never mentioned in any of his talks with me was the stock market, was market cap, was the stock price. Now, in the early days, as Laurene mentioned, he did care about the revenues and the profits of the company because it was almost dead. But once the company got on a kind of steady footing financially, my impression was, yes, he cared about the company doing well, but he did not care about what the stock market thought. At least I couldn't discern that at all. But as you know, he also didn't even appear on most of the earnings calls. And to me, the whole tech industry is caught up in what Wall Street thinks. So can you talk about that? Am I wrong or am I missing something? And would he be as frenetic about the price of the stock and your two and a half trillion dollar market cap as some other people are, journalists and other people who write about it, analysts?

Tim Cook: I think it would be unimportant to him, Walt. I would agree with you completely. He was not driven by the financial results. He was driven by making the best products that really enriched people's lives. And so he was about changing the world. And that is really not marketing speak. That is what drove him. And he saw the success of the company merely the result of doing the other things right. And so he was never confused about focusing on the indirect consequence on the market and the financial results. He focused on the inputs, getting the products right, making sure they were the best, making sure they were making a difference in people's lives.

Kara Swisher: Thank you, Walt.

Walt Mossberg: All right, I'll see you soon.

Kara Swisher: Okay, Karen. Thank you. By the way, Walt Mossberg and I did it together. So everybody give a clap for Walt Mossberg. Okay, we're going to get to some questions. If they are all about the new iPhone, I'm going to make you move on, because I want to talk about Steve Jobs, if you don't mind. It's my conference, and so there you have it. So we ask some questions and then we go. And I have something I want. The last thing I want to read. So Neela and all of them, short please.

Audience Member 1: Go. Yes. Don't worry, I was there this morning. I don't have any questions about the iPhone. They wouldn't let me on your plane, Tim. You guys talked a lot about how Steve would think the current political climate was really divisive, that social media was bad. At the end of the day, those apps run on your phone. Those apps are why the smartphones are popular. How do you think Steve would have felt about the phone itself enabling some of these applications? And would he have wanted to take more control of that interaction?

Tim Cook: I think, well, I don't want to forecast what Steve would have thought in 2022. But what we felt along the way is that some people were using the phone too much. And we never put out the phone for somebody to endlessly, mindlessly scroll in a feed. And so we created things like Screen Time to try to help people know what they were doing. And with the thinking that if people knew, that people are really smart, that they would alter their behavior. And we've seen some of that. So I suspect when he started parental controls back before anyone was talking about parental controls, I suspect that he would be thinking about more of those things.

Kara Swisher: Are you as worried about TikTok as everyone else at this conference?

Tim Cook: You know, I don't feel like a TikTok expert. And so I would let other folks talk about that.

Kara Swisher: You don't seem like a TikTok expert, although I do enjoy your air fryer content, Tim. It's really fun to watch. When you think about design in that same vein, do you worry about how it's used? Do you think about the intentionality of design?

Jony Ive: Yeah, I mean I think if you're innovating there will always be unintended consequences. Some of them wonderful and some of them not wonderful. And I think the issue is just how your decision in terms of what responsibility you need to shoulder. I think the more powerful, I mean, there's wonderful historic precedent for powerful tools having that ability to be used in both ways. But I think it's, the consequences, in the end of the day, I think it comes down to how you view your responsibility.

Kara Swisher: Okay, Ina?

Ina Fried: Ina Fried with Axios. This is a question I've actually wanted to ask several of you for a long time. We've alluded to Steve's more challenging personality qualities. I'm curious which of his hard edges you think served him and which were the ones that kind of got in his way sometimes.

Kara Swisher: Oh, Laurene, you get that one.

Laurene Powell Jobs: There were a lot of qualities that served him because he was an extraordinary leader. And he had, as we were saying, confidence in his own abilities to see and understand. But also something in it that Tim mentioned is Steve actually called other people all the time, every day. He had a list of people he called, and he just would ask them, what's going on? What are you seeing? What are you thinking about? What are you watching? And he would go across industry and call people who, of course, would answer the phone. And he would just pick people's brains constantly, which was a really interesting and I think not widely spoken about trait of his. And I think it made him, it reminded him to keep a beginner's mind. And it reminded him that these ideas exist and are held by very, very smart people. I think there were times, however, when he would, to his detriment, perhaps feel so confident in a point of view that this is the corollary, that he actually didn't necessarily interrogate it in a way that he might have. But it also played to his benefit.

Jony Ive: I think there's one thing that really struck me was that if you think of the behavior or the characteristics of somebody who is so curious and questioning, and then you try and think of the characteristics of a person that has the required resolve and focus to turn an idea, despite all the problems, despite all of the barriers, to turn that idea into something real. And then along that way, when you come against a problem, you can't just stamp your foot. You have to go back and exercise those muscles of curiosity again. And I think one of the things that's perhaps not obvious is that doesn't happen just once or twice in a program. It happens once or twice every morning. And I think that sometimes if you don't have that sense of context, it could look like antisocial behavior.

Kara Swisher: Over here, and we'll get here.

Audience Member 2: Hi, Zia Yusuf. Thank you all for these amazing insights. I wanted to ask you about the role of spirituality in Steve's journey, and the focus on simplicity, the curiosity, the design aesthetic. Did that play a role? Is that also driven, Jony, for you and others around design? Any thoughts on that? And I don't mean religion. I just truly mean spirituality.

Jony Ive: I think it's tough to have a conversation about beauty without being sort of very humble and aware that there's an awful lot more going on than we can easily articulate or see or take a photograph of. And so I think that, again, those are wonderfully unusual juxtapositions of conversations that are maybe perceived as esoteric and ethereal right next to, well, what does the wall thickness need to be here so we can cool this properly? And I think those are lovely conversations to have at the same time.

Laurene Powell Jobs: I would say he was spiritual.

Kara Swisher: Oh, yes.

Laurene Powell Jobs: I think when he was young, 19 or 20, he dropped out of college and he went to India. And that was a spiritual exploration that he had and came back and studied Zen Buddhism. And for many, many years had a teacher that he would sit Sazen with and study with. And that was in the early, early days, obviously, of Apple. But I think it absolutely shaped his sense of his place in the universe as an individual being. And also it helped shape his sense of time. And I think he had a very sophisticated notion, not only that our time, all of our time, is quite brief in the context of the rest of the natural world, but also the way to use your time in a very wise and deliberate manner.

Kara Swisher: Okay, right here.

Audience Member 3: Good evening, beautiful people. My name is Laquan. So we talked about connectivity being very vital to what Steve saw. And I think a big aspect of connectivity is communication. Communication was revolutionized with the iMessage, right? How do you think Steve would feel currently about the state of communication, specifically between people who aren't within the community of Apple and are part of the iMessage, but more so on the green side of things with Android. We've seen a massive divide there. So how do you think Steve would feel about adapting RCS, rich communication systems, that would normalize and streamline that? Tim, can you bring peace to the phone wars?

Tim Cook: He always told me not to wonder what he would have thought, just to do the right thing. And I don't hear our users asking that we put a lot of energy in on that at this point. And so now I would love to...

Kara Swisher: Phone wars continue.

Tim Cook: I would love to convert you to iPhone.

Audience Member 3: Got you. It's just, it's tough not to make it personal, but I can't send my mom certain videos or she can't see me certain videos. And so we leave her out.

Tim Cook: Buy your mom an iPhone.

Kara Swisher: All right. Let's get to as many questions as we can. Go right up here. No, right here, and then we'll go here. Go ahead.

Audience Member 4: Yeah, you said privacy is a human right. It's also monetizable. You've rolled out a lot of features. App tracking transparency is probably the big one. It improved privacy but also hobbled some of your competitors. They've been very vocal about that. I don't have to list who they are. You're also reportedly building up your own network. So it's obvious how that would help Apple. How does that help your users? And is that still consistent with Steve's vision for privacy?

Tim Cook: Well, we started advertising back in 2009 or 2010 with iAd. And then it morphed into search ads and so forth. But we follow the same rules or, in fact, more stringent rules on privacy than we put others up to. And so digital advertising is not a bad thing. We've never said digital advertising is a bad thing. What is not good is vacuuming up people's data when they're not doing so on an informed basis. That's what is bad. And so we try to put the user in the driver's seat there to own their data.

Kara Swisher: Okay, right here.

Audience Member 5: Hi, how's everybody doing? First things first, I'm glad to actually see you guys in person. It's like the people who pretty much govern my life. Okay. They're real. They are. Oh, sorry, I didn't make you touch it. And I wrote down this question because I've been thinking about this just in regards to my business and what I want. So for you guys, to me, you guys are like the Nike of technology and products. Same way to me, I see Nike as the Apple of shoes and apparel. So it's like, for me, I want to know, how do you gain that monopolization over your market? And how do you keep that grasp over your market and never let it go? Because I know it's a journey. I know it's a struggle. I know it's a fight. But you guys have competitors, but we don't see your competitors. We see you. So it's like, how do we get that grasp of the market if we're looking to change in our business?

Tim Cook: We actually have fierce competitors. We're in the most competitive industry there probably is. A smartphone market. We're not the market leader in terms of market share. Samsung is. And if you watch football or any other thing on your weekend, you will see their ads everywhere. And of course, there's lots of other people in the smartphone business as well, including Google and Huawei and Oppo and Vivo and Xiaomi. And so all of these folks are spending tons of money around the world. What we do is we just try to very simply tell our product story, say what we're about. And we try to make it as simple a message as possible, because there's a limit to the messages that you can get across in a 30-second ad or even a one-minute ad. And so you'll see us occasionally highlight maybe photography and the beauty of the photos that you can take. Maybe another time we might focus on video. And so we may take one feature and really highlight it in a great way. Maybe we highlight privacy. And maybe we highlight the ability of the iPhone to withstand drops and so forth in certain cases. And so just make it very simple is our message.

Audience Member 5: And you say you guys have fierce competitors, but if I were to ask everybody here to ask, who in here has an iPhone or an Apple product? This is what I mean by you guys have the monopoly.

Tim Cook: No, the facts don't bear you out.

Audience Member 5: All right, but thank you.

Kara Swisher: All right. Thank you. All right, thank you. We don't have time for more questions. I'm sorry. Apologies. Sorry, Steve. And you get to talk to them plenty. And same thing with you, Laurene. So I'm going to indulge you. One more question, final question. And thank you all for being here. I really appreciate it. It means a lot to me. One word for Steve Jobs, if you had to say, I know there's so many words, but one word. And I have one, and I'm going to finish up on that. One word.

Tim Cook: Curiosity.

Laurene Powell Jobs: I don't know. I'm still thinking.

Kara Swisher: Jony?

Jony Ive: That's an impossible question, isn't it? And he wouldn't answer it. I don't know.

Laurene Powell Jobs: Radiant.

Kara Swisher: That's a great one.

Jony Ive: I would say pure.

Laurene Powell Jobs: Nice. You could think of something. See?

Kara Swisher: Yeah, I'm going to say surprising. And I'm going to tell one Steve Jobs story which took place at Code. We were in the back and Walt was, he had just come off and he had met, I think Louie for the first time when he was maybe of Louie or Alice. And he started asking me intense questions about how we had them, like a lot. And he never did that. Like he was always interested in Walt. I was like the girl standing next to Walt most of the time for him, because he and Walt had a very interesting relationship. But he was really interested. He asked tons and tons of questions. And it was because he himself had been adopted. And he asked about adoption and this and that. And I said, well, I had the baby because I have a uterus and it's great. And so, but we're doing this adoption and that. And there were lots of adoption problems at the time for gay people. And he told me his whole story sitting there. It was amazing, which has been reported. It wasn't quite the same, it's been reported, but it was what he told the story about the doctor and his parents and this and that. And one of the things he did was say, "You're not who you were born to." Because I was like, "Oh, I consider out must have been Alex. I consider him my kid. I consider I didn't have him, but he's my kid. I adopted him." And he said, "It's not who you're born to." And he talked about his adopted parents, how much he loved them. He was crying. He made me cry. When I think about it, I cry about it. And he went on and talked about it. And he said, "Just remember, it doesn't matter where you came from. It's who you are and the people who love you." And it was, I was surprised. And that's what I would say about him. He was surprising as a person. And I had thought he was a very different kind of, not like that. And it was really quite a moment. And then, of all things, he hugged me, which I don't like. But he did. And it was really, I just couldn't believe it. I was sort of like, "All right, I'll log some Jobs." But the reason why I want to read the last thing from his, and this may make me cry, I read it every three months. And this is why we do the things we do. Remembering, I think I'm not going to be able to read this. "Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make big choices in life. Because almost everything, all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure, these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you're going to die is the best way to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart." I think we'll end on that. Thank you. Thank you.