This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star

and the American people. Up next,

the story of an American innovator and an American artist. We're talking about Steve Jobs.

Here to tell the story is Walter Isaacson, the author of the biography of Steve Jobs, among so many

others. We'd like to thank the Library of Congress for allowing Steve Jobs, among so many others.

We'd like to thank the Library of Congress for allowing us to use this audio.

Let's get into the story. It was about eight years ago that I got a phone call from Steve Jobs.

I had known him for the past 20 years since 1984 when he came to Time magazine to show off that wonderful

Macintosh computer. And even back then in 1984, I saw the passion for perfection

and also that impatience that was bred into his personality and how those two things were connected.

He showed off the Macintosh at Time magazine and how beautiful each icon was, made us use a jewelers loop

to look at the beauty of the pixels, the design, that little off-kilter disk drive that made it look like a smile. But then he told us that our

magazine, um, stank. Actually, he used a four-letter word, and he said Newsweek was much better,

because we had not made him man of the year. And I realized then that that connection of that

passion for perfection and that driving impatience

were all part of a seamless system the way a great Apple product from the hardware to the

software to the content is part of a seamless system.

So when he called me, I was just finishing up Albert Einstein, and Steve said,

I want to take a walk with you, and he said, why don't you do my biography next? Now, my first

thought was, okay, Ben Franklin, Albert Einstein, you. But the more I thought about it, here's somebody who was the American creation myth,

...