The thing that integrated into my life and the life of my peers was something i really didnt understand particularly well. I, you know, a lot of us have that moment, i think, when we are abruptly and suddenly forced to go without it. I lost it in this case; left it in a cab. When i was retrieving the phone i was standing in line at the dmv and of course, i immediately put off the meetings at work and any other obligation. You just get your gone back. That is what you do when you lose your phone. It started gelling in my head. What is it about this one device that gives it this power . There is very little else i can imagine being forced to do such a thing. And as i sort of resolved the kind of digging into this and pealing off screen and seeing it more as just a Consumer Product i sort of started to realize there were there stories. There was the history of the phone and how it was developed at apple. That was carefully guarded by apple and the corporation. The other side of the story might have more work than a steve jobs keynote presentation. Then, you know, in parallel to that there is a story of how any technology has to develop and that requires much more vast time lines and more input and complexity. We kind of wanted to look at both of them in tandem and see how one pulls from the other. In a way the chapters not about apple are about the development of this sort of technological buffet line. Apple has been able to come along saying we want that and this. We want multi touch, and we will use this lithium battery and this arm chip that uses very Little Energy but is also a formidable processor and then there is the story of how they integrated each of those people which is the story of apple and i try to tell both. Moderator earlier on there is a moment of epiphany. You get your phone and it is torn apart. Explain that. Guest that moment came early on. One of the first things i did was look at this phone, which is, you know, all screen, and say the first step is to find out what is actually in this thing. I took it to i fixed it which is this company in san luis obispo. It is a refurbished car dealership. It is a cool place. A great staff there. And their mission is to kind of keep gadgets repairable and keep transparency about what is inside them. What apple wants to do is make us think of this thing as only they can provide, only they can fix, only they can have the power to sell, market and put into the after market. These guys are like this is something you buy yourself. This is an object that can be fixed or tweaked if you desire. I took it to them. They are skilled repair and breakdown technicians. The guy was called a tear down engineer which is great job title if i have ever seen one. We started walking me through and said you have to be careful for the cables on top buzz they are connected to the censor. Once the screen is off you are looking at a sea of guts and the battery is half the real estate and then you can start leafing through and this whole world opens up. That was the moment that really sort of setup an epiphany you are talking about. What is the pent alobe . It is a signature screw. Apple doesnt want just anybody to open up. It was a classic steve jobs mantra. He was quoting saying we dont want to let people into our stuff because they will just mess it up. It will just give them an opportunity to screw it up. That has sort of been instilled into apples design process process everything since. It works nicely with the compact, small sealed up. But the pent a lobe and you cannot just go to your work bench and get a screw driver and open up the phone. Even though you bought it. You have to track down this custom tool that is small enough to get these little screws so you can open it up. It sends the message it takes someone trained and skilled. This isnt for everybody. They are trying to indirectly maybe install this idea it is to be upgraded every year and not to be fixed or tampered with. It does say a lot about apple, i think. More broadly, you run out themes in here and one of them is the myth of the loan adventure this goes back to isaac newton in the 17th century that i see further than others only because i stood in the shoulders of giants. But the case you make in the book with scrupulus reporting is this is particularly true for a product like the iphone. Elaborate on that point a bit. And some of this well it is sedimentary layers that build on each other. Part of why this took off as it did is the timing of all these things coming together; right . And apple putting them together. Help me out and help us out with, you know, what so striking in the complexity of this product. Yeah, so i fully believe that is one of the most important thems in the book. In this case, in the case of apple and particularly steve jobs who led apple, that myth of the lone inventor resonated powerfully. It is compelling narrative and useful for marketing a product. If you have somebody who is charismatic, very smart, someone like steve jobs can come sell the product and forever be associated with it when that is a shade of the story. He was hands on and had a lot to do with it. But the truth is like even the iphone as far as it was developed at apple never would have happened without scores of people working around the clock to make it happen. And that is the deeper trend lines we are talking about with all the prior technologies. Steve jobs is a commanding presence and it is easy for us to process that. This guy handed it it down and now we have the iphone. But exploring these stories is so important because not just on the scale of the breakthroughs apple managed to do which is they did further the art in a lot of important ways. On the engineering side they managed to get multi touch which allows us to swipe and zoom and do the hand vocabulary that translates into the computing and they managed to get it on glass in a way that hasnt been done. They did amazing work designing this human interface that makes the iphone what the iphone is. It is called the jingle of the iphone and it is what makes it memorable and it is the experience. The little rubbing banding effect. You didnt have to talk about it. All the things coming together and Everything Else is at at point so those little elements where apple poured its heart and soul into further that part and and apple does deserve credit for that. This crew of guys called had irony team started experimenting in the free wheeling research. It was fun and wild. They had this crazy projection they were using to hack products together to what would become the iphone and steve jobs had nothing to do with that from the beginning. Once he saw it in a form that was convincing enough and the demos were good enough they convinced him to take it up. So the invention comes from so many sources and it is important to trace the different origin stories. I think the swipe and so forth is the defining thing people see. This guy wane westerman who you do describe and his saga. Tell us that story. It comes from elsewhere. Multi Touch Technology, i did try to trace it as far back as i could go and visited stern. 60s and before. This guy name ben stump great name. Great name and a great pioneer in Touch Technology. That was a fun antidote. Some of the first Touch Technology was a stone throw away from the development of the web. The iphone integrates web and Touch Technology so you can touch maps online and move through pictures and it just got swept up into the stream of technology that would wind up later. But the guy who put it on the table was wane westerman who was this brilliant engineer from inmid the midwest and comes from a family plagued by disability. He had severe hand disabilities. When he was a phd student dissertation and we could he could not write and he had to stop. He looked around at the market to see if there was any alternatives to these hard keyboards which at the time were more cumbersome and there were not any. He trained some of the algorithms to try to start recognizing gestures and swiping. Pretty soon he came up with a pad that let him write the dissertation and seemed like a Good Alternative for people who had this problem with their hands. Instead of always typing it was a lighter touch and you could do a lot of things with swiping and gestures and the vocabulary was a lot larger than what we can do with the iphone today. He started manufacturing this product called finger works and it was beloved by a small number of users. People with strained injuries liked it. Editors, Music Software users, people who were kind of thought it was cool you could swipe and do little gestures and it was an opaque black pad you would use next to your mouse or keyboard. It wasnt on a screen yet. A Junior Engineer at apple happened to bring one in and the guys i mentioned earlier who were bringing this free wheeling experimentation, these Junior Engineers, said what is that . That looks interesting. That literally became the focal point for their experiments and that was under the projector when they wheeled in a Projector Screen to combine the touch sensing unit. They put a piece of paper over it and beamed down the home screen of a mac at the time so you could touch the mac software and that was what really sparked the entire trajectory of the iphone. And his mother had chronic back pain as well and he had a history of knowing this and then it is the university of delaware. It is not stanford. It is really kind of cool. That was one of my favorite stories to drudge up. He is still at apple so i could not interview him on the record because he is behind the titanum curtain as they say. But i was able to get in touch with his sister who told the familys back story and it was fascinating. It is one of those store as that, you know, of overcoming adversity to sort of produce something that ends up helping a lot of people. This is not even just the iphone now. It is the same basic technology in antroid and it is informing the laj wj language of computers. I will just read a paragraph and ask you to elaborate. This is bolivia. Frederico is the name of the mountain. Fa fascinating details. They ruled the spanish empire for hundreds of years. Some 60 of the silver was pulled out of the area but then the mining bloom turned into one of the biggest cities in the world. 160,000 people. Local natives, african slaves and spanish settlers living there making the investor hub larger than london at the time. More came and the mountain swallowed many of them. Between 48 Million People have believed to have perished there. You go down there for what reason . Well, it out that apple sources some of its tin from this mine that used to bank roll the spanish empire thousands of years ago. The same place which was incredible. Apple listed suppliers, where it sources and the suppliers get their metals and one of these is, you know, sourcing metal from this mountain. Tin mostly comes from there and the tin is used in sodder solder. It is fascinating to me this cuttingedge device and thing that is integral to how we think of modern moments is rooted in the same mine sadly by children sometimes with hand axes like pulled out of the rock. It is easy to disconnect these two ideas. The product to its origin as stuff that comes out of the earth. I thought it was important to spend a chapter looking at where it really begins in a physical sense not just a, you know, the sense of its history, but where the actual physical material comes from. It is not just bolivia and it isnt just tin. It is the cobalt for the batteries. It is the lithium which is one of the more benignly mined materials but has drawbacks still and that was in nearby chile where they mine lithium in one of the driest deserts on earth. There are materials being pulled from every continent on earth and they all feed into the iphone. And you did an allin exercise about how much mind if you will and how much of the earth and water is used to produce the xnumber of iphones we have. Refresh my memory. This came out and it was a big number. It is a lot. It is i mean you have to tear up a lot of ground to get a little bit. It is Something Like 75 kilos for over tiny 129 gram iphone. You are moving a lot of earth just to do that and that means you are using a lot of, you know, toxic chemicals and we focused on the cyanide because it is used to extract gold. You are producing all these by products. For every single one of these it is an exponential amount of earth that is mined. And since i published that part, i looked and there have been other estimates that are worse and his was on the conservative side. So basically, you know, if you are thinking about getting the aluminum out of the earth, you have to huge industrial operations in australia. To get the gold, you are drenching in cyanide to remove this tough stuff. The tin is coming from loosely knit mining structures. There is all these different feed ins. We have having a big impact on the planet by creating these small sleinsulined slender devices. How many miles did you log . Did you do a rough calculation . I didnt but i should. You know, i should track and look at the iphones gps tracker. Lets go to china. You did visit this plant where these things were made and you got in. You are one of the few people to have done that. This guy, mike daisy who wrote a play posed just as a contractor and there was appear opening. Tell us that story. Well, i have got to give the credit to my fixer, my translator, who is a journalist in shanghai. We were just i think we were kind of imposing because we had tried through the sort of above board channels all day. We had tried to get in and interviewing people at the gates and allarou around. We even met a floor manager who manages an operation who said they would not mind taking us on butia need executive approval. We burned all day trying to do interviews to get in outside the gate coffee shops and noodle places exactly. There is sidewalks outside and a structure you can walk over. Give us the dimensions. This is x number of football fields . From the outside, it is deceptive. It seems like it is all walled off and the wall goes on as far as you can see. There are buildings looking up over it and what happened after trying to get in all day i had to use the bathroom legitimately. The idea was like you know, what, maybe some genuine urgency and it translated. There was a bathroom we could see and my translator was like we will come right back. And nobody tailed you . Not that we know of because we literally ran after getting into the bathroom. I ducked around and we just ran and we were in. Once you are in, it really sinks in, it feels like a city. We kept walking one direction until we hit the end. It is kind of dilapidated, the building and things are rusty. It is kind of like the docks at the edge of the city and people are playing a pickup game of basketball and it looks like a minor Chemical Spill with cones around it and no one tending to it. It is really just kind of feeling rough. We turned around and started walking in. In this regard, this place was filled with almost half a Million People. Towering dorms, giant factory blocks, you really just get the sense you are just this tinaly, little, you know, insignificant sort of piece of organic matter navigating this huge giant machine of industry. But like a city, you know, it kind of became more gentrified and con dendense. Closer to downtown you get commerce with a 7eleven inside and one of those mascot things. And age range of the people is what . 1825. This is like, you know, the new england textile factories in america. 1622yearold women. It is that kind of system. Yeah, done by hand. It is all done by hand and it is all, well not all, but largely people who come from rural areas to send money back home and they become skilled workers and most of them dont last all that long there. A lot of people say you can only tick it for a year. Plan was to work there a year, get a new job, get out and some of them that i interviewed said they were offered management positions or raises and they just said it was too ugly. The management culture was too ugly. I sort of felt that. This place, you know, was immense on one scale but the more striking thing was there was nothing in the entire city sized factory that was designed to sort of cater to the human spirit. It was all either you are working in a factory, you are paying to eat in the cafeteria, you are paying to shop at 7eleven. There is no nice public area. It is all designed to squeeze the maximum value out of person as possible. And meanwhile, you are wedged between a giant gray factory blocks and it it is something i can only limit to my one drive. I spent an hour and an hour and a half inside there. I cant say i really you know, there is another side to this, too. You know, it used to be there were ten applicants for every job available. Everything you say true by our standards. It is also there is an element to how much it is creating opportunity. Right . However grim it may be. Apple has done things on this front in terms of disclosure. Elaborate on that. Without more sort of more had sort of substantial reforms to the way that just sort of that the work is carried out. The cultural if you mess up on your supply line you have to be publicly humiliated by your boss. And a lot of that is sort of the catalyst for this oppression and tragedy. So there have to be ways to am l as this this huge most valuable company on planet had this giant of the industry can wield its influence to get things to a better place. And youve dealt with labor group and so forth so, i mean, is there a suggestion or two that comes to mind that makes sense to you . Well, or, i mean was this is mache of the tradeoff is that these reasonable is to consider. Right. Yeah. So or there a bunch of standards that you know, after this fallout apple sort of joined this sort of business this best practice of and right now the biggest critique from china labor watch is they havent kept their basic promises. If they were to do what they said they were going to do, guarantee limiting overtime hours and making certain you know confession to workers that would go a great deal and make sure theres things yongd that that they would like to see so absolutely. It is absolutely a tradeoff. I mean, people are coming from, you know, poor parts of china to work here for a reason because theres some opportunity. Yeah. You know, youve dont cost on environmental side, human toll where its, you know certain but this looks more, more severe toll if you will or you know, or the tradeoff looks particularly rough from our perspective. But, i mean, way you come out on this you use an iphone and that is gold standard, and you know who knows with the samsung. Exactly. Thats the other really important point im using kind of as a loans to view the way the industry works righ