how do you think he changed the country? you know, as i was preparing to come here to the studio tonight to talk to you, i got all these e-mails and tweets and dms from people saying, do him justice. and i think for a lot of us who were born in the 70s, the same decade that apple was formed, the same decade that jobs vision for democratizing technology and for improving life through design in this unusual way, for those of us who are from this era, his passing marks an end of an era. an end of a shared experience that has helped to form all of our lives. if you think about the way this man saw design, he said it, himself. design isn t just the way something looks and feels. design is how it works. and so much of what he contributed to technology was about seeing technology as an extension of the human mind and as a way to extend our
capabilities to communicate, to connect, to perceive the world more richly. it s a really sad day to see him pass. and in terms of what you said there about democratizing technology, using good design to do that, i think that it s i think that we when people talk about steve jobs as a visionary, i think that the basic thing people are talking about is this idea that design had to start being part of the way that you competed. but i think you re getting at something a little bit deeper there about it being functionally important that stuff became easy to use and that there became an expectation that stuff became easier to use. the easier things were to use, the more people could use them. that s not the most complicated idea in the world except when you combine it with the idea that once everybody can use these machines, they can then
technology that matches that rebellious vision, that is how he will be remembered. and his life changed our lives. his work, his design, his vision of technology really did change the world. i will forever be grateful for that. xeni, when we talk the kinds of traits you were talking about make sense to me in terms of how you end up with an inventor or a visionary, again, how he s being lauded today. the think i feel like i ve never fully understood is how apple as a company stayed so ahead of the rest of the industry. i mean, even now the big question in tech right now, in commercial in consumer tech is who can come up with something that s like the ipad. how did that translate into a
us, that everybody has access to those things. that we re all plugged in. it is the right kind of jobs investment for the country to put people to work laying those lines and connecting those americans to the grid and the right things to do for the rural parts of the country so people and businesses in every part of the country can compete economically. joining us now for the interview tonight, our nation s secretary of agriculture, also the former governor of iowa, tom vilsack. mr. secretary, thanks for being here. it s great to be here. i did not know i would be talking to you about things like expanding broadband access on the day steve jobs died, but his death has me thinking about the democratization of technology and how important it is economically to us as a country that everybody has access to computing power and to internet power. you know, if you re a farmer you want to have access to that power so that you can make realtime information available to you so you can make
pilots, by people operating spaceships, by doctors in surgery rooms. if we have a common language of technology, that common platform of technology, i feel like that s this sort of greater arch of steve jobs legacy. i don t think it s an accident, either, that someone who had that kind of depth of incite that we heard in that timeless 2005 commencement speech that he gave, he spent times he spent time in oshroms. he dropped lsd. he studied calligraphy. he stuied buddhism. he studied hindu religion. he explored ancestral traditions, spiritual traditions. he was veraciously curious and incorporated things people at the time didn t think were part of computer science and were part of design. and that kind of ability to see things differently like in that great 1997 apple ad campaign. that the idea of seeing the world differently and creating