Note: Transcripts may contain errors. If you wish to re-use all, or part of, a transcript, please contact CBC for permission. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print. Copyright © CBC 2018

The Current Transcript for December 10, 2018

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: Hello everyone, I'm Gal Gadot and I'm very excited to be Huawei's Chief Experience Officer. We've got lots of surprises planned for this year, so just wait until you see what we have in store.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: It is not the promise of consumer surprises from Huawei, but rather the suspicions of surprise on the security front that are in the background of the U.S. request for extradition of its CFO. As Meng Wanzhou's case continues to play out in a Vancouver courtroom today, we're asking more about the success and suspicion around the 5G technology that Huawei has come to dominate. How much of this is fair and how much of this is about the wider issue of China's dominance in areas where Western governments and corporations think is theirs? And then what happens when a medical researcher has an idea that most all other scientists in the field have dismissed as unworkable?

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: These stories at the time were complicated and they didn't make sense to him, which made him think well, I'm an idiot. I must be stupid. Then he realized, no, actually it's not me, it's them.

AMT: James Allison rejected the scientific orthodoxy and was rewarded for his rogue research directions with a breakthrough in cancer treatment. He is a bit of a rogue scientist who excels in the harmonica when he's outside the lab and he is in Stockholm today to receive the Nobel Prize in medicine. So where is the line between the quirky maverick who finds the breakthrough and the ones whose obsession goes against the grain and down the wrong path? We're talking about that in half an hour and.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: Imagine the exuberance of finding out you have a father and then finding out he has a mansion and he drives a Porsche and he doesn't say anything the whole drive.

AMT: Her dad was one of the most imaginative and successful people of his time. He was also an enigma for the public and for his first child. In an hour we revisit my conversation with Lisa Brennan-Jobs, with her complicated personal view of the late Apple founder, Steve Jobs. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

Back To Top »

Concerns percolating over Huawei's 'leverage' over Canadian cybersecurity

Guests: Louise Matsakis, Stephanie Carvin, Wenran Jiang

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: When I was in government, we were increasingly concerned about the penetration of Huawei into western democratic telecommunications networks. These are organisations ultimately tightly tied to Chinese security apparatus and we think there's some real serious issues that are, I obviously note that the United States is encouraging Western allies to essentially push Huawei out of the emerging 5G network. And my personal view is that that is something that Western countries should be doing in terms of our own long term security issues.

AMT: Well it seems the whole world is weighing in on Huawei, including former Prime Minister Stephen Harper there on the Fox Business Network last week. The Chinese technology company CFO Meng Wanzhou has been held in a Vancouver jail after her arrest in Canada a week ago, at the request of the US. US authorities want her extradition, alleging her company contravened U.S. sanctions on Iran. And while the specifics are complicated, the stakes are not. Already a BC trade mission underway in Asia has canceled its China visit. The stock markets are wary of an escalating trade war. One of Huawei's CEOs, Ken Hu, told The Wall Street Journal that "Huawei is not a vehicle for any government or any agency of putting surveillance on another country." Over the weekend, China called in both the U.S. and Canadian ambassadors to Beijing to protest Ms. Meng's detention and it called on Washington to cancel the extradition order. Amidst all of that, the cyber security concerns Mr. Harper alludes to persist. Huawei is the world's second largest mobile phone manufacturer and a key player in developing the next generation of 5G mobile communications infrastructure. Louise Matsakis covers security and social platforms for Wired and she joins us from New York City Hi.

LOUISE MATSAKIS: Hey, thanks for having me.

AMT: What exactly is 5G?

LM: So I think the easiest way to think about it is, imagine downloading a movie in a couple of seconds, instead of a couple of minutes or an hour. It's going to really rapid, it's going to be a really rapid increase in the speed of data across using your phone and on your desktop device. You know imagine going to a concert and your mobile data slows down because everybody's using the same technology and that won't happen anymore. Your phone will be much faster, your computers will be much faster, you'll be able to transfer data much more quickly than you're able to now.

AMT: And the other side of that is you'll need it for something like autonomous driving, correct?

LM: Right. Self-driving cars, VR headsets, internet connected devices that we use in our homes. You're going to have a lot more sensors and collecting a lot more data in our houses, you know self-driving cars, all sorts of this technology is going to really be enabled by 5G because it's going to allow that data be collected and transferred much more quickly.

AMT: And this the data coming from our smartphones or is it also coming from sensors?

LM: Yeah so you might have something like you know a sensor on your fridge that you know pings your phone when the food inside has gone bad or you know a VR headset where you can kind of immerse yourself in a concert with people who are actually you know thousands of miles away. That sort of thing, so it's going to be both collecting data and transferring data. You might be able to send a hologram of yourself to your mom who lives on the other side of the country or something like that in a couple of seconds.

AMT: So we're talking about the speed it moves to milliseconds right and they need that for say autonomous cars because they have to be able to react quickly, am I right?

LM: Right exactly, they're collecting a lot of data and they need to process it very quickly. You know process it back to a computer, process it back to the company that makes that self-driving car to make sure that you know they can react in case of an accident or that they're able to process you know the world around them the way that a human driver would.

AMT: So if we're going to have that kind of millisecond technology, what do we need?

LM: So the thing about 5G is that the waves that power it tend to be a little bit faster than the waves they use for 4G LTE and the problem is that these faster waves can't travel as well. They have trouble with obstacles, they can't travel as far away to antennas. We're going to need a lot more infrastructure, a lot more antennas, a lot more you know equipment in order to make 5G possible and you know the companies that make this technology are Cisco, Juniper in the U.S. and companies like Huawei in the rest of the world.

AMT: And so where would we expect it to be operational first?

LM: So there's actually this kind of war going on, whether it's going to be China or the U.S., who's going to really implement this technology on a wide scale first. So you seen you know we had a test earlier this month of 5G technology in Maui in Hawaii. So you've already seen kind of the first iterations of what this might look like, but it's really unclear who is going to really be the first to implement it on a wide scale. Could be the U.S., it could be China, it might be South Korea. We're not really sure yet, but the kind of prediction is that this is going to be more widespread by hopefully the beginning or the middle of 2020. So it's you know more than a year away.

AMT: It's already popping up on my Wi-Fi, like I have a choice of my regular Wi-Fi or 5G, so is that because the infrastructure's getting prepared?

LM: Right yeah, so some companies such as Verizon have kind of put out test versions of 5G, where you're able to use it at home, but you don't have it on your mobile device yet. And it's not widespread, not every person who you is able to buy home Internet is going to have that option at this point. But yeah there is kind of some iterations of it starting to pop up, but there's also different standards, so we don't have kind of agreed upon standard that everyone is using. For example, Verizon is using a different kind of standard. It's messy right now. We're not really sure how the 5G landscape is going to play out.

AMT: So amidst all this buzz around 5G, there are big concerns about privacy and security. Why is that?

LM: So there are a couple of concerns. I think you know from a business standpoint one of the concerns with CTE, another Chinese telecommunications company and Huawei, the longstanding concern has been economic espionage. So they're stealing trade secrets from American companies or from other Western companies. That's kind of the left theoretical concern that companies have complained for years that Huawei is possibly stealing their IP, right. And then the kind of more theoretical concern that you know a lot of politicians have and a lot of lawmakers have is that they're going to steal you know data or secrets from you know the American people or they're going to be spying, that sort of thing. And the way that they think that that's going to happen is that you know a country will implement Huawei's technology and they don't know that there is a hidden vulnerability that the company has perhaps shared with the Chinese government. That's kind of the concern is that if you're using this technology and you're not aware of a hidden back door or you know let's say they actually do implement it in good faith and then they do find a problem and instead of sharing that problem with a western government, they actually give that problem over to the Chinese government. So those are kind of the two more theoretical concerns. We haven't seen evidence of that, but you know the concern is that if an entire country is relying very heavily on this technology, even if they do kind of see an issue or see an issue with the Chinese government, you can' just kind of shut it down right.

AMT: So in other words because our phones are pinging off so many things, we are able to be tracked or there can be surveillance?

LM: Right, right, that they might you know ship the equipment with a vulnerability built in that then the Chinese government could exploit to collect data, to listen in on how that data is flowing and who people are talking to, that's kind of the concern that you know you might ping an antenna innocently and not realize that you're transferring that conversation or that data to the Chinese government. And to be clear, you know these concerns are fairly theoretical for the time being, we haven't seen any direct evidence of that, but that's kind of been a longstanding anxiety from a lot of Western lawmakers that only seems to be spreading.

AMT: Well and we know that a number of countries, three of the five I's, the U.S., Australia and New Zealand, have barred the company from conducting operations related to 5G. This is why?

LM: Right. Yes and Japan is also considering the same. So that's definitely part of it. You know it also I think the Chinese government would argue that it's economic protectionism because you know Cisco and Juniper and these other countries and Ericsson in Europe, these other companies in the west are direct competitors. You know and I think there is a good national security concern and also kind of an economic concern about whether or not you know Huawei will be this dominant telecommunications company everywhere except for Europe and the U.S. So there's kind of a lot of concerns here that's not just about direct spying, but you know there is this worry that if a whole country is relying on a Chinese company that's really close to the Chinese government like that, you know what's going to happen if there is an issue?

AMT: Okay. Well Louise, I'll pick up on that with my next guest. Thanks for your time today.

LM: Thanks for having me.

LM: That's Louise Matsakis, she covers security and social platforms for Wired. She's in New York City. Well with 5G expected to push interconnectedness to a whole new level, many people are raising concerns about the security of the underlying network and to find out how much of a risk Huawei and China could pose to Western communications systems, I'm joined by two people. Stephanie Carvin is an assistant professor at the Norman Patterson School of International Affairs at Carleton University. She's in our Ottawa studio. Wenran Jiang is a senior fellow at the University of British Columbia School of Public Policy and Global Affairs. He is in our Edmonton studio. Hello to you both.

WENRAN JIANG: Good morning.

STEPHANIE CARVIN: Good morning.

AMT: Wenran Jiang, I'm going to start with you. Meng Wanzhou is back in court today. What are you thinking as you're watching this unfold?

WJ: Well I think there will be more arguing between the U.S. Canada authorities want to surrender to the United States and I think Ms. Meng's lawyer would continue to press for her first release, due to lack of evidence they would argue, as they did on Friday. And then probably the immediate goal is if this procedure is not done, to get her out of jail on bail. I think we will see more dramatic development today.

AMT: And Stephanie Carvin were you surprised to see Canada take this step on behalf of the U.S?

SC: Yes I was. I was quite surprised actually because this is a very dramatic move. I mean this isn't just any company and you've already heard about Huawei with your prior guest, but the fact is this is a company that's often referred to as a national champion by President Xi of China. You know this is a major flag-waving company. They're not a state-owned enterprise, but they're definitely a state-supported enterprise and it plays a large role in the kind of vision that China sees for itself and certainly what President Xi sees for the future of China. So to take this move was exceptionally bold and it's certainly going to have some consequences as the other guest here is suggesting.

AMT: Wenran, talk to us a little bit more about the consequences. China's already called in the US and Canadian ambassadors to Beijing. What are you seeing in terms of the response in China?

SC: Well we can see at one level, official level, the Chinese government has reacted extremely strongly. I would have to use that kind of discrimination because the latest wording in calling in Ambassador John McCallum is actually the text I read, I have not seen in that recent memory, short of imposing sanctions, calling ambassador or declaring some kind of dramatic actions. This is as severe as they can use. They also accused Canada of not notifying the Chinese authorities of arrest immediately in violation of the bilateral consular agreement and then they called in the United States. So that's one level, officialy we're looking at a very severe crisis situation, but people tend to forget the populist social level the Chinese public in the public social media cyberspace, virtually exploded in condemning this act. And so Canada is being seen as some kind of in the front doing the dirty work of United States war against China on trade and wider issues.

AMT: Stephanie, is this really about Iran sanctions or is this also about perceived security threats down the road?

SC: It's hard to separate the two, but I mean the way this trial is going to go is definitely going to be on the evidence. The United States is suggesting that Ms. Meng oversaw some bank fraud, for example. So that you know the courts have to basically now determine whether or not what she's accused of the United States would actually constitute a crime here in Canada. That's my understanding of the basis of the extradition trials. But you're right, I mean there's back context of everything that was discussed with your prior guest. The fact that there's a lot of concerns about Huawei's behavior. In this case it's not just the fact that there's the threat of espionage or I would even go so far as to say you know there's concern over the amount of leverage you actually want to give an adversarial state such as China over your state's critical infrastructure. But at the end of the day this is also about whether or not China is trying to circumvent an American security parity, which is of course sanctions on Iran.

AMT: Stephanie, just talk about the infrastructure for a minute. So one of the concerns is about actual espionage. The other concern is what control, the ability to what, shut down infrastructure or change or control it?

SC: I think so yeah, I mean that is definitely one of the concerns that you would. I mean if you know there is the vulnerability that allows spying, would there also be a vulnerability that would eventually allow you to actually also shut down a state's critical infrastructure. I mean we've already seen China talk in very serious terms about unspecified consequences if Canada doesn't give into Chinese demands. If China had considerable more leverage over our infrastructure, you know would they retaliate in such a way. And so this is you know the kind of balancing act we have to strike as we go forward with a country like China, with a company like Huawei.

AMT: So do you think these concerns are legitimate, Stephanie?

SC: I do. I think they are legitimate, at the same time you know, it's a very difficult. We spend a lot of time focusing on this kind of really narrow technical aspect of it, but it's not just that, it's also the fact that you know as a state backed enterprise, as a flag carrying enterprise for China, you know this company can't fail. It has the backing of you know a state with one sixth of the world's population. And in this sense when Huawei comes into our markets, it also has a very distorting effect on our economy and we really haven't figured out a way to deal with this kind of broader issue. So you know I think there is the technical aspect, I think there's the very important risk to espionage, possibly critical infrastructure, but I worry that we're focusing on these issues, as opposed to kind of we don't really know how we want engage with these kind of national champions that Xi is anxious to put out in the world.

AMT: Well let's get Wenran Jiang's view of that. Are these legitimate security concerns in your view?

WJ: Anna Maria, I think a number of points. It is legitimate concern of course, if and when we regard China as our enemy. I think the U.S. forces Congress, the government intelligence agencies together here in Canada, Canadian intelligence agencies have been trying to limit Huawei or drive out Huawei's presence in Canada for quite a long time. That's one point, second, there is absolutely so far no evidence as the previous reporter and Professor Carvin mentioned, no evidence whatsoever so far Huawei has done anything illegal. And that is still a concern. People say it's tied with the Chinese government, so therefore the concern about Huawei is not about what Huawei does, but what Huawei is and what China is. If you regard China as an enemy, here you go. The third point on the collective silence in the current past few days of those blank coverage about Huawei, they forgot to mention the inconvenient truths that is the American government National Security Agency cracked into Huawei network as early as 2010, implemented a backdoor as revealed by Edward Snowden and concluded by 2012. So all this spying that Huawei has no evidence of any corroboration with the Chinese government and yes the US and the current five I countries, continue to try to push Huawei out. I'm not saying we shouldn't be concerned about it, I think we should for potential risks, but the audience should also know that the current evidence against Ms. Meng is extremely weak because there's actually no proof she actually committed offense according to Canadian law, as far as the evidence on Friday shows.

AMT: OK so in the Globe and Mail today, there's a report that CSIS met with leading research universities doing work with Huawei and get an information session, but there's a lot of money going to professors and their graduate students on this. There's also concern that there's a billion dollars worth of costs if Canada pulls out because already Huawei is putting infrastructure in. Stephanie Carvin, what's at stake here when we talk about security on that level with research and actual telecoms doing business?

SC: Well that's just it. So I mean I think just to be clear, I don't think there is a unified position within either the Canadian intelligence community or the Canadian government as to what to do with Huawei. There are some security agencies that are very anti-Huawei, we see these as going out and speaking to these universities, but I think the view is I think there's really kind of a struggle to grapple with some of these issues for the reason you just mentioned, which is that Canada is a small country. We need foreign investment and we need investment in research and development and we don't have enough money ourselves to really invest in the kind of future technologies that you know Canada wants to develop here. So you know one of the issues is that we do have Huawei coming in and saying hey we'll spend 50 million dollars at Canadian universities and you know that's going to pay for PhD students, graduate students, but you know the result of that is that then China comes in and says well we want that intellectual property.

AMT: Lots to watch as this unfolds and it's back in court today. Thank you both for your time.

SC: Thank you.

WJ: Thank you.

AMT: Stephanie Carvin, assistant professor at the Norman Patterson School of International Affairs at Carleton University in Ottawa. Wenran Jiang, senior fellow at the Institute of UBC School of Public Policy and Global Affairs. He's in Edmonton. Stay with us, the news is next and then when we come back, we're talking about maverick scientists. This is The Current.

[Music: Theme]

Back To Top »

James Allison won a Nobel for defying scientific orthodoxy. What about the mavericks who don't succeed?

Guests: Charles Graeber, Veronique Greenwood, Gregory Feist

AMT: Hello. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

[Music: Theme]

AMT: Still to come, in her memoir, Small Fry, Lisa Brennan-Jobs brings powerful insight into what it's like to grow up with separated parents and a distant father, a father who happened to be the inventor of the iPhone, the Macbook and the Lisa computer. We'll hear from the daughter of Steve Jobs in half an hour. But first, the consequences of blazing your own scientific trail.

SOUNDCLIP

I think I'm an essentially lucky guy because when the trials of my drug I invented were going on, it became clear that it worked and we know now that based on studies of thousands of patients that have been treated, that about one in four, one in five, they'd get a single treatment will be alive 10 years later. I mean they basically effectively cured. One of whom I met later, she said I'll do anything, I just want to live two three months, see my son graduate high school. So I met her 10 years after that. She just hugged me and thanked me and said she didn't really expect to see her son graduate.

[playing harmonica]

AMT: Well he's played harmonica onstage with Willie Nelson. He's got long shaggy hair and funky round glasses. That man you just heard is James Allison and he's getting his Nobel Prize in medicine at a ceremony in Stockholm today. The Texas immunologist does not fit the typical picture of a scientist and he doesn't think like one either. James Allison's ground-breaking work in cancer research involved a fair number of maverick moves, disregarding the received wisdom of his field. But while going against the grain can steer scientist to key breakthroughs, it can at other times lead them down the wrong path. We'll be exploring both sides of that fine line today and the personality traits that take scientists there, starting with Charles Graeber. He is the author of The Breakthrough: Immunotherapy and the Race to Cure Cancer. And he interviewed James Allison for his book. Charles Graeber joins us from New York. Hi.

CHARLES GRAEBER: Hi Anna Maria.

AMT: Can you picture James Allison pulling out that harmonica when he's on stage with the King of Sweden today?

CG: You know I'm sure he won't do it, but I'm sure everyone would be delighted. I think it's remarkable that now we have two harmonica playing Nobels, you know Jim Allison and Bob Dylan.

AMT: There you go. How did Jim Allison push against cancer research orthodoxies when he was doing his immunology research, Charles?

CG: It's interesting, the way he achieved his breakthrough is essentially by not looking for it. Jim Allison was never trying to be an immunologist or at least not a cancer immunologist. He wasn't really aware of the controversy and the pushback against cancer immunotherapy, which is to say the whole notion that the immune system can even recognize cancer, let alone target it and kill it the way it does, pretty much everything else and the way it does the common cold. That idea was really controversial and he waded right into the middle of it, but not in any interest to settle that controversy. He was simply following his own interest, his own drummer if you will and so his maverick aspect is essentially a confidence in his own curiosity and his ability to satisfy that curiosity, regardless of what it did to career or reputation or anything else.

AMT: Well tell me a little bit more about how other cancer researchers have viewed the field of cancer immunotherapy then.

CG: When Jim Allison first started working, when he first started his career in science, there was no such thing as a T cell. His own professor at the University of Texas, Austin, told him that he didn't believe they existed, they were just too weird. They just seem too complicated. People thought they understood how the immune system worked. The idea that there was greater complexity, seemed too much. Jim Allison found it fascinating. T cells became the focus of his passion and he wasn't really aware of or concerned about the fact that there was another debate that had been happening for hundreds of years, really thousands of years. From the beginning of time, we have had this disease, this disease mutation that takes over our body and kills us, cancer. And since that time, there really hasn't been any effective treatment for it, but there was always the observation that sometimes the patient becomes infected, for some reason sometimes because of a surgery, sometimes just because the cancer erupts and sometimes that infection seems to kill the cancer and the patient is cured entirely. And that was always considered a miracle or magic. And the idea that that type of treatment, which ends up being an immune treatment, something that awakens the immune system and somehow alerts it to cancer that became a disgraced idea. Right up until the moment that we had this breakthrough, understanding how the immune system is essentially tricked and shut down by cancer, the sort of secret handshake if you will, that cancer gives the immune system telling it not to attack, right up until that moment, cancer immune therapy was a field in disgrace.

AMT: What is it that Jim Allison in lay terms, what did he discover?

CG: Jim Allison discovered at a time when everyone was trying to understand how do you make a T cell go, this defender cell that we have, this killer cell that we have in our bloodstream, how does it recognize a foreign cell, an invader? How does it turn on and begin its attack? And everyone was looking for sort of an ignition switch, if you will and they thought they found one and that didn't do it. It didn't make the T cell go. They thought they found a second one and that didn't do it. And Jim Allison's big aha was that we're not looking for a gas pedal, we're looking for a brake. Turns out that T cells, they're really good at what they do, but if they run wild, they are the most dangerous thing in your body, more dangerous than any disease and so they have all sorts of breaks built into them to prevent them from attacking a healthy body cell and these brakes are manipulated by cancer, taken advantage of by cancer.

AMT: Okay so that's what he did. He told you a story about reading research papers and wondering if he was an idiot.

CG: He sure did and this is an aspect of his maverick sensibility. He was saying that he wanted to know everything there was about T cells. He would just go to the library and copy everything out and read it, just on his own really. His science was his own project, even when he had a lab. He would pursue whatever he was interested in, regardless of what he was supposed to be studying. Not a lot was known about T cells. Science is sort of a story that we tell ourselves and it's not always accurate or true and these stories at the time, were complicated and they didn't make sense to him, which made him think, well I'm an idiot is what he told me. If I don't get it and these people with these degrees, from these first class institutions are telling me this is the way it is, then I must be stupide then he realized no, actually it's not me, it's them. They don't know what they're talking about. I mean what a remarkable thing for a young scientist to say, but he ended up being right and that insight and confidence allowed him to break through and see the world in an entirely different way.

AMT: He wasn't working at any of the key labs at the most prestigious institutions when he started his research. What was it about his circumstances that allowed him to work toward a breakthrough?

CG: He was located in a little lab and the best thing about that lab, it wasn't a lab anyone had heard of, but they pretty much left him alone. I think the university forgot that he was even there because it had changed presidents and that gave him the license to do really what he wanted. That led to some of his first big work that did get picked up by other scientists who had a name and a reputation and gave him the license to go to the University of California at Berkeley and continue in that track. So one of the messages here and one of the things I learned time and time again in writing The Breakthrough is that it's pure research, which is to say, research for its own sake, research that you don't know where it's going to end up and you're not trying to achieve any one in. For instance, Jim Allison wasn't really trying at the time to cure cancer, although that's exactly what he ended up doing. That pure research is the most valuable sorts the only way to really achieve true breakthrough because what we don't know is beyond our imagination and it's unexpected.

AMT: Charles Graeber, an amazing story, thanks for sharing it with us.

CG: Thank you.

AMT: Charles Graeber wrote The Breakthrough: Immunology and the Race to Cure Cancer. He joined us from New York City. We're going to play a little bit more of Jim Allison on harmonica with Willie Nelson onstage at the end of our program today. In the meantime, we're talking about Frances Perey, who was a nuclear physicist in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, who also thought he had made a huge breakthrough in the 1980s. His story ended quite differently and his granddaughter found out about that while she was going through his papers, after his death last year. Veronique Greenwood is a science writer and she joins us from Shanghai. Hello.

VERONIQUE GREENWOOD: Hello. Thanks for having me.

AMT: It's good to have you with us. What did you find among your grandfather's papers?

VG: When my grandfather died, there was a lot of stuff piled up in the house and we were going through his study, I found this collection of letters and also drafts of papers written across a number of decades. So when I started to read them, I immediately realized that what I had here was a record of a series of thoughts that he had that he thought was some of the most important work he'd ever done.

AMT: So what was his theory?

VG: So it took me a really long time to get around to this myself. About a year actually of talking to various different physicists, but what he seemed to be getting at was that he was really interested in why it is we believe that certain things will happen in the future. This is actually a surprisingly deep question. It's something we never, most people don't question. If you ask somebody, you know how many times will a flipcoin come up heads, they'll just say half the time. Everyone just knows that. But if you start to probe into it, people who really study probability, don't feel like it's cut and dry to just say oh it's 50 percent. They have many different interpretations of probability to explain why it is that it might be 50 percent. Now what my grandfather believed he had found was a way that probabilities arose naturally from physical laws. If you understand enough about how the coin works, then you can come up with a mathematical proof that shows exactly what will happen to it.

AMT: Part of the issue with his theory was its complexity. Where did that complexity lead him?

VG: So part of the issue with the complexity of it was that he had such difficulty expressing what it was that he thought he saw. I feel like this is a common problem with people who have really new ideas, whether they're good ideas or bad ones. Expressing yourself is extremely difficult and you often wind up in these kind of shouting matches with your colleagues or with peer reviewers and a lot hinges on whether you're able to really get across what you mean in the way that other people's eyes will you know widen and say oh I know what you're talking about.

AMT: How had he tried to get his theory recognized by other scientists?

VG: So in the papers that he left behind, it's clear that he submitted to journals I think five or six times over the course of the 30 years and right away at the beginning, when he was really quite excited about this idea, I mean if his idea as he understood it worked, it would have implied really phenomenal things about the way the physical world can be understood. He even thought that it would help bridge the gap between the quantum mechanical world and the classical world, which is of course a huge rift in physics. Those two worlds don't really function the same way, he thought he might have found a bridge to go between them. The first journal that sent him a peer review, man it was a pretty scornful review. I have it in front of me here. Incomprehensible. If there is any core of actual results anywhere in this incredible work, it is completely hidden from me by the page after page of maddeningly repetitious philosophical froth.

AMT: Wow okay. So when you talk to scientists today about your grandfather's theory, what did they think?

VG: Well at first, a lot of the people I talked to, they either said I don't understand it or they said what's the big deal? And now I understand that that's because most physicists are not really interested in this particular area of physics or philosophy of physics. So the things that he found either seemed completely incomprehensible or they seemed trite. And it wasn't until I talked to these folks over at Rutgers that I found people who really kind of understood what he was starting to get at. And that was profoundly exciting to me because I don't know, call me a pessimist, but I never really thought that he had something. You know you think when you come across a theory in the papers of someone who's dead, you know maybe they were onto something that just nobody understood before now and I guess I felt at the beginning, if that were the case, surely someone else would have seen it by now. And it's true and I talked to people at Rutgers they didn't tell me you know, he's had a breakthrough, but they read it and they said this is really interesting, they've never thought about this this way before and we think it's really a shame that it was never published.

AMT: So what was he onto something? Was he just misunderstood or was he off the mark?

VG: Well I think that at the very core of the papers, the first thing that he worked on, I think there might be something there that could be interesting to people who study probability. I don't think that he had discovered the bridge between the quantum and classical worlds. I think that the longer this idea went unpublished, the greater it grew in his mind. I think when you spend that much time on something that hasn't yet yielded any fruit, you think well it's got to be great right. I've spent all this time and it really does feel like an epiphany to me.

AMT: How much of his time did your grandfather do out to this theory?

VG: Well at the very beginning, it's clear that he spent about four years solid of working on it and that this was not popular with his boss at the lab where he worked, which is fair, I mean he was an experimentalist. He was not being paid to do this kind of work, this kind of theoretical work. After that, he worked on it on and off for the next 25 years.

AMT: What impact did that have on his career?

VG: He wrote in a letter to a colleague that he was afraid he was going to be fired. He'd fallen in love with this idea so deeply that his bosses just couldn't take it anymore. And after that he did go back to doing his more normal work at the lab, but my grandparents, my grandmother was also a scientist at the lab. They retired early and they moved on to a sailboat that he named after this French mathematician and then they spent seven years sailing around on this sailboat. I mean if his work had been published or if he'd been able to get someone to understand him, is it possible he would have had a longer career? Possibly.

AMT: So from your perspective as his granddaughter, what do you think it was about him that made him stick with his theory, despite not getting any traction?

VG: I mean he was an incredibly stubborn person. He was such a character to be around. He would have these weird obsessions that you know you can never tell from one year to the next, which obsession it was going to be. One year it was sailboat racing, another year it was the history of the Smoking Mountains National Park. He had these passions for things and he didn't really care if pursuing them meant that everything else fell by the wayside. When I read his papers after he died, I just saw that same thing that I'd seen in him his whole life, just there on the paper.

AMT: So interesting, Veronique thank you for talking about this.

VG: Thank you so much for having me.

AMT: Veronique Greenwood is a science writer who has written about her grandfather, physicist Francis Perey and his theory on probability. She joined us from Shanghai. There is a long history of scientists facing pushback when their work clashes with the status quo. From Galileo facing opposition from the Catholic Church and fellow scientists for arguing that the earth revolves around the sun to Paleontologist John Ostrum who ruffled feathers by asserting that dinosaurs were more like modern day birds than lizards, but even the most ground-breaking scientists can get it wrong of course. Isaac Newton may have three fundamental laws of motion that bears his name, but he was also an alchemist. Gregory Feist is a professor of psychology at San Jose State University. He focuses on psychology of science and creativity and he joins us from Berkeley, California. Hi.

GREGORY FEIST: Hi, Anna Maria.

AMT: Listening to those descriptions of Jim Allison and Francis Perey, what parallels do you see between the stories that have two very different endings?

GF: Well I mean as a psychologist of science, I find both of these stories fascinating. These fit all the patterns that I've found in my research. I really like Charles' phrase, confident curiosity because that really is at the core of a lot of kind of ground-breaking science. You know, first you have to be curious, but also you have to be confident in your perspective. Science is a very competitive enterprise. People don't always accept new and different ideas and if you don't have faith and confidence in yourself, you're probably going to give up. And so the people who push through are often the ones who do make some breakthrough.

AMT: At the same time, we heard about a very stubborn person, who clearly had enough confidence to keep trying to figure out a theory that wasn't there.

GF: Well yeah and that's what I find fascinating because well creative confidence and original confidence and a willingness to keep going, persevering, sometimes takes you down a rabbit hole. Ultimately that's okay. In fact actually, one thing about the creative process in general is that it is by its nature, has hits and misses. If they are hits, we learn about them. What we don't learn about typically are the misses, but you know like Veronique's grandfather's case, you know going down that path, but then ultimately going back to his more regular research, you know sometimes you have to be willing to do that and have that freedom to explore ideas and that's the nature of science and that's the nature of the academy to have freedom to be wrong.

AMT: Why is the maverick scientist such an appealing figure?

GF: Well the maverick scientist clearly fits this ultimately kind of a stereotype, which is probably becoming less true these days in big science, where people are working in big labs. But this idea like Einstein working in this patent office, you know this lone genius following his or her own path and having interesting, maybe even bizarre ideas, but ultimately that freedom is very important. You know creative people in general, need to not worry too much about what other people are thinking and often they don't.

AMT: What are the benefits and risks to that ideal though?

GF: The benefit is that you have that freedom and you aren't influenced by other people and again, as we saw with Dr. Perey, you know you can go down the wrong path and you can stay down that wrong path for a while. So the line between confidence and stubbornness is sometimes very fine.

AMT: And it's interesting because those of us on the outside as we watch these or we find out about such people who are mavericks and it might appeal to us. I'm thinking of big scientific issues like climate change, where you have you know thousands of scientific pieces of work that point to climate change, but you have an outlier who then people say, well he knows something they don't and it's used by laypeople to make the arguments.

GF: Well exactly. I teach a critical thinking seminar to seniors in my university and one of the things we get into is the distinction between science and pseudo-science. Just because there are some people who think differently, doesn't necessarily mean they're going to be right. Well what's the preponderance of evidence? What's the best evidence showing? In the climate change case, it's clear that the evidence is showing that humans are impacting that. And there are a few, two or three percent of scientists out there who disagree with that. But in that case, the preponderance of evidence is that humans really are affecting climate.

AMT: And so we're talking about scientists who are the lone scientist as you call them, who continue to be curious about something that maybe others don't see. You interviewed molecular biologist Peter Duesberg three decades ago. What theory was working on then?

GF: He was a virologist and he focused on cancer, but he was a real maverick. He had this idea that the oncogene theory, which ultimately went on to win a Nobel Prize, a couple of years later, but he really rejected that idea. Part and parcel to that, he also took issue with HIV being the cause of AIDS and those two things came out in one paper in 1987. You know when it first came out, it wasn't completely clear, especially the HIV hypothesis was still open and up in the air. By a couple of years later, by the time I interviewed him in I guess it was 1990, the evidence was mounting that that was not the case that HIV really was the cause of AIDS and yet he persisted. And I remember when I interviewed him, I was thinking you know as someone who studies the creative process and these mavericks, I was kind of pulling for him. I was thinking wow it woud be really cool if this guy were right and you know he was seeing something that other people weren't seeing. But ultimately science and the nature of science, requires that you follow the evidence. No matter what you believe, in fact that's what makes science I think one of our better ways of acquiring knowledge, is that it's independent of your belief and opinion. And that if the evidence is solid, you are kind of forced to go that way, whether you like it or not. And unfortunately Duesberg ended up not doing that. At that point, you go from being a maverick to being kind of almost a pseudoscience or non-scientist.

AMT: So that's the difference. When you talk about that curiosity, confident curiosity, it's not solely the confidence, it's the curiosity that you're open to seeing where it goes as opposed to stuck in a certain way of looking at it?

GF: Yeah I mean I think Carl Sagan had a very good perspective on this. He talked about science as being that exquisite balance between skepticism on the one hand and openness on the other. You know you start science being skeptical and that's what Duesberg was doing. He was skeptical of these ideas, based on his own research and experience and that's the valid starting point, but he wasn't open. He didn't have the openness to admit that he was wrong.

AMT: So let me ask you, how can science benefit from the ideas that do go wrong?

GF: Oh well I mean we need pure research. We need people to just be able to explore whatever curiosity they happen to have and go that way. We don't know in advance what ideas are going to take hold and clearly you know Jim Allison didn't necessarily know that his idea was going to ultimately help cure cancer. And so you just have to have that openness and willingness to just explore ideas, just for their own sake and then ultimately later on, some use may come out of it. In fact, that's an important point I wanted to make is that the creative process, whether it's in science or art, is really defined as both having original and novel ideas, that's the obvious part. But what we also need understand is that those ideas are only really creative once they have meaning and use to people or society, but it may be decades, maybe even centuries before society catches up and finds meaning and use in these ideas.

AMT: Gregory Feist it's so interesting to hear what you're exploring. Thank you.

GF: Thank you.

AMT: Greg Feist is a professor of psychology at San Jose State University. He focuses on science and creativity and he joins us from Berkeley, California. Stay with us. Coming up, Lisa Brennan-Jobs is the daughter of a maverick, Apple Computer's, Steve Jobs. In her memoir, Small Fry, she focuses on the complicated family life he created, not the shiny tech. Stay tuned for her in our next half hour. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current on CBC Radio One, Sirius XM, online on cbc.ca/thecurrent, on podcast and on your radio app.

[Music: Theme]

Back To Top »

How lunch with Bono led Steve Jobs to reveal he named a computer after his daughter

Guests: Lisa Brennan-Jobs

AMT: Hi. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

[Music]

AMT: Global leaders are gathered in Poland for the UN's annual climate change conference and they're working under a deadline. Climate scientists have warned that we all need to take drastic action by the year 2030. That gives us 11 years. And on Thursday, we will bring you a special edition of The Current. We're calling it, 11 years: A Blueprint for Climate Action.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: I think grown ups should think that we actually should make an impact and not just sit back and let it happen.

VOICE 2: I think grownups should think, not just for themselves, but what the kids, for their kids and the next generation because if they only care for themselves and they'll be gone before the real effects of what they've done is happening.

AMT: Some kids in Vancouver calling for action. The good news is the experts have a pretty good idea what it would take to make that impact.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: There's an enormous amount of innovation coming up from all the different professional sectors, the biologists, the foresters, the planners and architects and engineers, they're all thinking about solutions. So there are I would say millions of people around the world, a network of people right now, thinking about how we can do this. The thing that people mostly I think don't understand is that it affects them right now and that also that there are things that they can do right now and that their actions count right now.

AMT: You will hear some of the climate solutions that are already underway. What more needs to be done, what you can do to pitch in. It is a race against the clock, but it is a race experts say is still worth running. That's this Thursday. Tweet us @TheCurrentCBC and let us know what you're worried about and what more you would be willing to do.

[Music]

AMT: This is The Current on CBC Radio One. We're going to talk to a woman who grew up shuttling between parents, a successful and distant father she longed to spend more time with, a mother who struggled to hold it together financially and often emotionally. In many ways she could be any kid whose parents split, but she was not. She was, she is the daughter of Apple founder, Steve Jobs. And in her memoir, Small Fry, Lisa Brennan-Jobs chronicles what it was like growing up with such a towering figure for a father, against the backdrop of sun drenched California in the 70s and 80s populated by hippies and artists. Lisa Brennan-Jobs' memoir was just named one of the New York Times ten best books of the year. We spoke in September. Hello.

LISA BRENNAN-JOBS: Hi. Thank you so much for having me.

AMT: Let's start with your parents. Tell us briefly about their romance.

LISA BRENNAN-JOBS: So as far as I understand they met in high school and fell in love. They lived together for a summer before he left for college and then they split up when he went to college. And then they got back together later. And then I was born, then I was conceived. I was definitely an accident. They were so young, they were 23 when I was born. And it was just at the moment when Apple was starting to take off.

AMT: At first your father denies his paternity. How much financial support did he provide when you were small?

LISA BRENNAN-JOBS: He provided no financial support when I was small and then I think what happened, again this is all part of the explication that I needed to be able to move on to my experience of the story. I looked at the court records. He was sued by the state of California which wanted to get the back payments because we were on welfare. He had denied paternity. So he wasn't really paying for anything and I think he was also quite busy at the time working.

AMT: At one point though he does, he's settles just before Apple goes public.

LISA BRENNAN-JOBS: He didn't settle. They just closed the case. He admitted to bring the father. And he was required to pay three something per month and voluntarily paid I think five.

AMT: But then Apple goes public right after that.

LISA BRENNAN-JOBS: My mother hadn't sued him. She was too busy. She was raising a child and she didn't have money. So the state had sued him and she was completely unaware that his company was about to go public. And so he had the case had sort of dragged on for a while and then suddenly was rushed to completion. And then a few days later, I think two days later Apple went public. And then it was worth a lot of money. But my mother isn't, as you see in the book, she is very wise and very intelligent but she's not savvy and that way. She wasn't trying to extract money from him or thinking about him as any sort of cash cow. I think she was just assuming and counting on his decency which he went in and out of being able to be- She was hoping for him to be decent. She was sort of innocently naively perhaps going forward. I think he probably was getting advice from lawyers and he was denying paternity at the time. So he was not trying to sort of step up and pay. I think he was probably trying to wiggle out of it.

AMT: And your mom, in those early years is single parenting. She's doing everything with you as the single parent. And you talk about how hard it is for her financially and emotionally when you were little. You remember these moments.

LISA BRENNAN-JOBS: So I talk about a moment when we were riding in the car together. It's interesting because I talked with her about this after I wrote it just to make sure her memories were the same. And she said 'Ah, not only do I remember that night, but I remember thinking Oh God she's old enough she is going to remember this night'. I think I was four. We were driving back from Tahoe. We live for a year and a half with her boyfriend at the time. He was lovely, he was a rock climber. But their relationship- Actually we weren't driving. Sorry we weren't driving back from Tahoe. We were driving back from a place we'd gone for a night which was a spa. I think she wanted to get away for a night to this sort of hippie spa in California. We were driving back through these dark hills and she was just sort of at the end of her tether. I think she was screaming. We were lost. The rain was pounding on the windshield. It was the time when children sat in their car seats in the front seat facing forward. So I do remember the wipers furiously flopping back and forth and my mother screaming hopelessly at the world, not at me, but swearing and slapping the dash and just feeling terrified at her sadness and hopelessness. Now being a new mum myself I cannot imagine how hard it must've have for her. I don't have a temper like she did. There is something wonderful about a temper that it's kind of like a rainstorm. It happens and then it's over and it leaves the air cleaner but it was hard.

AMT: That's why I remember that scene because the impression as you were a little girl but you were like watching this. And in reading your book I liked your mom. But I struggled with that scene because it was so emotional and there are a couple of times on your mom is emotional and really questions why is she's even alive in front of you. And you're wondering about how is her little girl, or her not so little girl now thinking about this. But that speaks to you as a writer too that you get me going down that rabbit hole with you.

LISA BRENNAN-JOBS: What my mother will do that in her darkest moments. She will question being alive. She goes to that point and then she rises up out of it again. And so did not include the dark parts meant that the lights perts didn't get to be their full glory either. And I did that with my father too. And I think that that's been difficult now that the book is out especially before the book is out. I think now that the book is out people read it and see that these characters are kept in some sort of balance that the whole picture is giving you the chance to feel the characters yourself. But when there were excerpts and there were difficult scenes jammed up against each other, before the book was out, it created a picture of a lot of imbalance that I think was seized upon excerpts of excerpts of excerpts. The way that the news cycle works now. In order to get my father I had to have his darker moments so that I got to get these delightful moments of lightness and curiosity and joy and end connection.

AMT: Well let's talk about some of that because right around the age of eight your dad starts appearing in your life more. So what changes to have him more in your life?

LISA BRENNAN-JOBS: I don't know. So I really admired as I was railing that he did come back into my life and I thought, I don't know about you, but when I'm not very good at something it's really hard for me to stick with it. And that probably gets exaggerated when you’re really good at something, or really good at many things which he was. But then with me he was quite awkward. In person he was quite awkward sometimes. Like physically he would trip a lot on the pavement and fall, or at parties he'd sort of sit in the middle of the party and read a magazine and his sort of loneliness seemed to me to almost have its own charisma. You'd at least for me it was hard to enjoy the party around him because I was worried because he seemed so lonely and sad. So there is a scene in the book and in my life where we're driving to his Woodside house, his mansion in Woodside - I mean imagine the exuberance of finding out you have a father and then finding out he has a mansion and he drives a Porsche and he's handsome. You know it is incredible. But we're driving to his Woodside house to go spend the night. And this is the first time really I've been alone with him and certainly the first time I'm going to go stay with him for hours on end and he doesn't say anything the whole drive. So he's very awkward. It wasn't that he was trying to be mean. I think he just...

AMT: That's who he was.

LISA BRENNAN-JOBS: Well also he was so young I was so young. We got to know each other so late. And how do you behave with a child when you don't know how to behave with a child? Well you do your best.

AMT: Then there's a great scene and you talked with this, a [unintelligible] to it later to. You'd go roller skating. And there was another side of your dad the two of you on roller skates. Talk to me a little about that.

LISA BRENNAN-JOBS: There were also long pauses, long awkward silences as we got to know each other. He would come over maybe when he was around once every few weeks or later once a week or something, and we'd go on roller skates and you have to remember this was a time before all of the communication we have now, before the iPhone, before cellphones at all. I think people maybe had these huge car phone bricks at the time but probably not. So we would go out for a long skate and there was nothing to disturb us. There were long silences. I mean my mother would wave goodbye to us and we were gone for five hours. Because we'd go and go to Stanford and then we'd go and get a snack and we come back. And sometimes he'd put me on his shoulders and he'd fall. But it felt like it was part of his idea of what it was to be father and daughter. And then later as we got to know each other better, he would say Lisa you've got to stop and smell the roses. You've got to stop and smell the roses. And I thought Oh God I don't want to tell them I think that's just an expression and he doesn't understand. But he would like stop and earnestly smell them and then pretty soon we'd stop and start smelling of them and it became a thing. It was very sweet.

AMT: I want to ask you about the story behind the Apple computer named Lisa. Your mother always told you father named it after you.

LISA BRENNAN-JOBS: She I mean she this is again goes back to the fact that they'd known each other since they were in high school. So she knew him. When I asked her why were you so insistent, or how do you know it's named after me. She said I knew. And how do you know that he is my father. And she is like, because I know.

AMT: But he denied it. He just said no.

LISA BRENNAN-JOBS: I think this is an interesting thing and I think the reason it is sort of is memorable for people isn't actually because he is famous, but who knows. I think it's because it's the strange intersection of the digital and the emotional.

AMT: It is interesting for me because it seems to me to matter to you. So all right I need to know why it matters to you.

LISA BRENNAN-JOBS: So it matters to me so much. And it didn't matter to me because I didn't care about computers because they didn't care about computers. It was just this idea that during the time when I hadn't had a father, when I had hoped I had a father. I mean if you're a kid and you don't have a father you notice other kids have fathers and you want one. And you especially want one if there's this glimmering idea that he's amazing and he's done amazing things and he's handsome and he's maybe lovely. And so why can't he be around. And the idea that he had invented this thing when I was an around meant that - and he'd needed after me - meant that during the time that I was wishing for him he was wishing and hoping for me. And so I kept on trying to get it out of him you know. But I was also mortified and terrified to get it out of him because if he said 'No' it meant more than just know it meant this crushing feeling that he hadn't been thinking about me while I've been thinking about him. But when I was in my late 20s we were having a lunch with Banu and at the lunch table he asked 'So the Lisa computer was named after her' and I sort of braced steeled myself for the inevitable. 'No no actually it was named after an ex-girlfriend' or whatever my father used to say. And this time he said 'Oh yeah yes it's named after her'. I thought oh course, of course that was. What an idiot I was for ever doubting it. And I don't know why he hadn't just said it was I. I do wonder now again as an adult. Was it because it had been such such a commercial failure? Or was it because it had been such a failure in his otherwise very successful trajectory. Or whether because he didn't want me to hold on to his coattails. I talk about a scene where my mother and father were living together and there were these people that they lived nearby too who were sort of waiting around for their inheritance, these kids just waiting around for their inheritance. And it was just like the most unappealing thing really kind of disgusting thing that went against the grain of both of my parents’ value systems. They had an idealistic hippie, 60s 70s qualities the idea of people wasting their time to wait for money was truly abhorrent. And so maybe he didn't want me riding on his coattails. These are two positive possibilities for why he wouldn't tell me it was named after me.

AMT: There are times you say you felt lonely even when you were living with him. There was a time as a teenager you knew asked your father and his wife Lorene if they would say goodnight to you in the evening.

LISA BRENNAN-JOBS: What happened was I had been doing pretty well at my mother's house. We'd been getting in more and more fights. I moved in with my father and my mother didn't come to say good night to me every night at that point I was 14. Fourteen year olds don't usually need a sort of elaborate goodnight ritual. Not that I was asking for that. But I think when I moved in with my father some of the old things that hadn't been addressed came at me strong like a tidal wave. It was too much and so I was assigning them to a variety of different things. If he'd just say good night to me every night then I wouldn't feel this desperate sorrow that seems to be coming from nowhere. If you get more furniture in his house I wouldn't feel so awful. If he'd get more - We didn't have heat in the downstairs rooms which sounds horrific right but it's northern California. It doesn't get that cold. You just get heat you know and it is a story that played well with others. Well he doesn't have heat. Oh your father doesn't have heat. But so there were difficulties and all these stories. What happened was I sort of drag them to my therapist's office finally and kind of demanded heat. And they kind of said no.

AMT: But you demanded this good night. And what did she say?

LISA BRENNAN-JOBS: My stepmother said look we're just cold people. And I think it was it's a very odd response I think in retrospect and it was cold. But the other flipside to that response it was a kind of tonic to my adolescent mopey idealistic rage. It sort of stopped my tears at the moment. I thought, wait you're allowed to say that? You're allowed to just tell someone what your limitations are.

AMT: What I'm asking all of us because yes in the media you've actually pushed back. Now other people say Steve Jobs was mean to his kid. Right. And there are different examples. He cuts you off I think in your last year of Harvard.

LISA BRENNAN-JOBS: That was mean.

AMT: Okay so these different things and then you're pushing back. What I want to ask you obviously when you read this book you love your father. You describe being with him as he's dying. But you've watched his company grow over the years and how he became to the public we watch that.

LISA BRENNAN-JOBS: So we have to remember when I was growing up he wasn't actually that successful yet.

AMT: No. That's true. But he was he was on a trajectory and we all know that trajectory even without ever knowing you.

LISA BRENNAN-JOBS: Other people have such a relationship with him.

AMT: That's right. And so that's in some ways we've imposed our view of your dad on to our smartphones. He's a real minimalist in the house you talk about not a lot of furniture. And my thought was 'Well of course' look at these beautiful products that are minimalist. That makes perfect sense to me. So we all have our own view of your dad and then we all know about what has been written about your dad how he was in the workplace, how he was brilliant and how he was also tough at times. And so we have to pull this apart just like your pulling it apart. This as your coming of age story about your not just any kid. You're his kid.

LISA BRENNAN-JOBS: No and I think it can be incredibly distracting.

LISA BRENNAN-JOBS: But you know that going. So what do you want us to think about at the end of this story about the Steve Jobs, not the Steve Jobs who is Apple but the Steve Jobs who you call Steve, not dad, but who was your dad?

LISA BRENNAN-JOBS: Well I try to allow people- I guess were books have to do as they're all the offers and then they and then you release them and they have a life of their own in everyone else's mind. And there is something distracting that can happen I think that I was really worried about when I published this book, which was that there is a famous person in it. But it's not actually the whole book. It really is a coming of age story about a girl but the relationship people have with this famous person can make them feel, I think, like this isn't a universal story. Like they don't have a way to relate to my family.

AMT: I'm going to interrupt you just to say I think in the end I think what we're left with is his wealth and his fame did not shield you from an adolescence where are dealing with parents in different places and you're dealing with all of those feelings that a teenager might feel, as they're trying to navigate two very different parents.

LISA BRENNAN-JOBS: No I think there's my father's wealth or fame or notoriety didn't shield me from being human.

AMT: I think we get that. I think we Understand that.

LISA BRENNAN-JOBS: I've been able to sort of go deep into the embarrassing qualities and the shameful qualities of that humanity to such a degree that I think other people perhaps reading it will see parts of themselves.

AMT: We're almost out of time. I just want to ask you a little bit about your final conversations with your father as he was dying. You had some really important moments with him. What stays with you? What comes to mind right now when I ask you about?

LISA BRENNAN-JOBS: I think that I had been hoping for a kind of Hollywood moment. I mean hoping against hope. There's no way I knew that it would happen and if this had been a fiction book there's no way I would have been allowed to include it. But we did have a kind of a moment of apology, a weekend of apology at the end where he kept on saying 'I owe you one. I owe you one,' which was such an odd new phrase. And I felt, sitting with him, standing with him, standing beside his bed, I felt very numb, honestly. Like I don't know what to make of this. He's so sick now that we can't really have a conversation about it. But I will take these sentiments and I will remember them.

AMT: Well just so our listeners understand what we are talking about here. He gave you this phrase but he also basically told you that he was sorry he hadn't come into your life sooner, and that he wished he'd spend even more time with you.

LISA BRENNAN-JOBS: It's a difficult thing I think. I was sorry for him when he was saying that because I thought the only thing you can really do when you are dying is have more time. So he's saying I wish we had spent more time. I thought, now it's too late. I thought, Oh no. But the other thing I thought and I wrote about this in the book is if he'd suddenly been better at that moment, suddenly been back to the peak of his health, I don't know if he would have been spending his time apologizing to me. He was still the same person he was. I'm not trying to depict him as suddenly this apologetic person but he was nearing death and this was a moment of great apology and I was, as it happened, quite grateful for it.

AMT: What he wants to take away from the father daughter story, and I know your mother is in it. I know you're coming of age, but there is a father daughter story in there.

LISA BRENNAN-JOBS: I hope people see, are able to see elements of themselves and their own complicated relationships in it. I hope that um instead of polarising too- of course she loved him. She forgave him. He was bad. He was good - that people will be able to hold all of these darks and lights in our hands in our arms at once and be willing to admit that we love sometimes complicated people.

AMT: Okay we will leave it there. Thank you for coming in.

LISA BRENNAN-JOBS: Thank you so much. Thank you for having me.

AMT: Lisa-Brennan Jobs, daughter of Apple founder, Steve Jobs. Her memoir is called, Small Fry. It was just named to the New York Times Best Books of 2018. She joined me in Toronto in September. That's our program for today. Stay with Radio One for Q. Natalie Portman is on the program to talk about her latest film, Vox Lux. Now I mentioned that Jim Allison, the maverick scientist receiving the Nobel Prize in Medicine had quite a musical distinction to his name. He has jammed with the harmonica onstage with Willie Nelson. We're going to leave you today with a bit of how that sounded. This is from a video posted online by the Houston Chronicle newspaper. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. Thank you for listening to The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

[Musical performance by Willie Nelson and Jim Allison]

Back To Top »

Back To Top »

Provide Transcript Feedback

CBC would like to acknowledge the support of the Broadcasting Accessibility Fund.

Dec. 10, 2018 episode transcript

More Stories Like This