Chrisann Brennan - A memoir of my life with steve jobs

[MUSIC PLAYING] CHRISANN BRENNAN: I just wrote this. It wasn't a part of my talk. And I want to say that I know a lot of people have profound feelings about Steve Jobs. He was a gem and a rare one. And I want to ask you to please only take what's of value of my talk today and let the rest go. This is such a new world to me. So many people have so many thoughts. There's so many angles of perception on him. But today, I'm simply talking about my perceptions. And I hope you'll feel it's a valuable contribution in total. I also want to say that I don't really know the technical world that you guys live in. I don't know what he created. So this is a new experience for me. And please forgive me for my naivete at certain points. So I'll begin. Today, I wanted to talk about creativity and initiative, first mine in writing my book and then Steve's in creativity as I perceived it. And thirdly, about Creativity, with a capital C, into the future. Because whether we're talking about children, new technology, the arts, companies, countries, or the whole world, now more than ever we need to be more conscious in our creating. We're all so creative that I think we need a metalevel of considerations, councils even, to figure out where we're going and what we want our outcomes to be. Here I am at Google, and you have the unofficial byline of "don't be evil." And this is what I'm talking about, except more of it, a long list of ethical considerations that people can cross-check because everything is affected by our creating. Before I start diving into my story, I want you to know that I'm predominantly right brained. I wrote this book cinemagraphically because I'm first and foremost an artist. And the practices of filming help me bridge my experience as a painter into writing. I think in a combination of images, symbols, metaphors, and words. In fact, I don't even think there's a big difference between symbols, images, metaphors, and words because they're as much an energetic fact as this podium is for me. Mainly, I think in terms of energetics. And I see energy and I have found visualization to be a force for actualisation. This is one of my most recent paintings. It was commissioned. And yet when I paint for someone else, I also paint for myself. The painting lay the ground for my book. This was my version of an outline. I didn't know what it fully meant until I was well into the writing. In fact, I'm still discovering what it means. I think the future is about left and right brain integration too. Its the evolutionary next step for people everywhere. And it's, of course, already started. If I have time, which I don't think I will, I'll do a quick decode on the painting at the end of the talk. And if I don't, I'll post the image and a decode on my book's website, thebiteintheapple.com, by the end of February. So there were three things that I decided I would never do in this life. I had enough self-knowledge by the time I was 35 years old to know what I wasn't interested or good at. One was study of history. I'd gotten crippling migraines, at least once a week, in my US history classes when I was young. I wasn't interested in so much focus on men's wars, politics, and treaties. Number two is that I would never play the drums because my sense of rhythm was so reliably wonky. Number three is that I'd never write a book, since writing was not my strength and because I knew it was way too much information to organize and be accountable to. Yet here I've written a book, and it's own history, and it was in part due to the rhythms in the language that I became interested in the craft of writing for its own sake. I'd written a couple of good papers in art college. But prior to writing this book, that was my only experience of real concentrated writing. Writing is traumatic and stressful for me. I love the ideas, but they seem to bottleneck if I have to sequence them on a page. Yet I decided I had to write this book myself because the process of writing was the only way I could drop down into a depth of memory and manage my own message. I started in 2006. And it took me over six years of full-time work to complete. Now I tell myself pay attention to what I would never do, because writing this book has been one of the most important things I've ever done. I also want to emphasize that if I can write this book, I'm really sure almost anybody can do anything. Over the years, a few people had suggested I write my story. Yet many more warned me off of it, even going so far to suggest that I didn't have the right to speak about my life or my history since it involved Steve Jobs. And I think many people were assuming the worst and implying that it was bad form for a woman to speak about the personal life of a man who was a public figure. But I did not write this as a tell-all. Instead, I felt my story was important, one, because I knew Steve before it all happened and also because we came of age together in a certain way. Two, because I witnessed firsthand Steve's changes as Apple began. And three, because we co-parented the child through all the years. Also four, I have a universal message and there's a universal message in my book. Steve and I met when we were 17. And I was his first love and I'm the mother of his first child and my only child. We knew, loved, and admired each other. And when things got difficult between us as Apple took off, I witnessed his incremental changes from sweet, mystic, poet, super-bright, goofy guy into a ruthless, stunningly successful business tycoon. In the end, it is precisely because of my direct experience with him that I feel I have important contributions to make on the body of knowledge with him. And the other thing is I never intended to pull him from hero status. I know so many people love him. And it would've been a balanced approach. I was always more interested in the human side of him. Did I understand everything that happened with Steve Jobs? Absolutely not. But I still think I have an unusual vantage point of some things that I think are unique and will be valued, may be valued, will be valued. So much seems to hang on my memory, my integrity, and my insight. In 2006, I became sick and it lasted for years. I had one of those undiagnosable illnesses that probably came from a combination of exhaustion, mold in the apartment I was living in, and too much exposure to fumes from painting. With a compromised immune system, I got one terrible illness after another and had to spend a lot of time doing nothing. Bored and languishing, I slowed way, way down and became willing to consider and then to decide to write my story. So with nothing else to occupy my time and in the most tremulous, naive, childish first steps that I began by writing a list of chapters and some good ideas in a cafe in Tiburon, California. To say I was reluctant to be public about Steve and my long history is an understatement. It's nuanced and a difficult story. And it was hard to sort through. Also I didn't want to relive the pain. Of course, Steve didn't want me to write it and this was *** me too, mainly because it put pressure on our daughter, who was going back and forth between our two households. Additionally, for years I absolutely questioned daily if I had what it took to write this book. And I put it down a couple of times, only to return to it with just greater commitment. One because the ideas were so rich, that they just seem too important, and also too interesting to drop. And two, because there was this exquisite sense of the pause in the writing process that I loved. The mounting silence of the years coming up to the tipping point and then their remarkable fall into words. I worked on the first 100 pages for two years, trying to figure out how to weave all the complexity into something readable. I worked seven days a week, about two to three hours a day, which took pretty much all the energy I had. When I started to get physically better, I committed to five hours a day, seven days a week. A huge turning point came for me three years into the project when a colleague took my first 70 pages and turned them into discrete, coherent chapters. Once I understood how to make a chapter, I completed the next 19 chapters in the second three years. My daily experience was that I would wake up early every morning and begin with the inspiration, working out all kinds of ideas. And yet no matter what, by the end of every day I was purely mortified by what I had written. This is a strange and strained history. The subject was over the top and I was deeply concerned about how it would affect our daughter's life. Also I felt that my story is, was a part of the collective unconscious and I feared no one wanted to hear from me. Add to this the fact that I didn't know the writing conventions for start talking about such a dicey subject, the personal and impersonal. I don't read that much. I had little experience in communicating about such difficulty in a balanced, truthful, and intelligent way. Five years into my project, I was still fretting and I told a friend I needed a Ph.D. to write this book. And she said, well, Steve didn't have a Ph.D. to do what he did. So get over it. Keep going. People have assumed I kept a journal because the detail in the book is so clear and descriptive. But I didn't have a journal. I'm just extremely observant and I seem to track detail through all my senses. Plus, this history had somehow stayed in something like a morphic field around me through the years because I assume it was waiting and pressing on me to understand what had happened. As I said, the process of writing was interesting to me. And there were times that things that seemed insignificant buzzed at me to explore more deeply. And when I followed them, they opened up my awareness into new connections and new revelations. Other times after getting the best sentences down I could, I had to double and triple check for the truth. In going back and forth between the descriptions and the truth, further detail would emerge. I found I also found that using word combinations of opposite meaning helped me grasp in language the startling extremes that were the hallmarks of Steve's personality and charisma after Apple started. All in all, the craft of writing itself distracted me from the pain, even as I granulated down into it. I have a type of dyslexia, some kind of dyslexia. And being that that was the case, I really could not have written this book with a pencil or even a typewriter. I don't think sequentially. Much of the material was so upsetting. And yet with a computer, it was all made easier, as I was able to move clusters of ideas around it big swaths to work out right connection points, that opened up more insight and balance. The plasticity that the writing with the computer provided me was like painting and it allowed for layering. And so it made it possible for me to handle the many years, while still having fun exploring the intricacies of ideas I was trying to access, layer, and get across. Then after a while, something unexpected started happening, which never would have occurred if I had been so focused on getting it right-- if I hadn't been so focused. As I relived the scenes in order to write them, I became more of a witness to it all and started picking up new levels of detail that I had missed when I had been so young, living through it. Plus the more attention I brought to the history, the more I saw and the more I felt that I was changing the history inside myself. Consciousness changes everything. For so long, I had met Steve's ideas of things define my reality. And he had become defensive, and fast, and intelligent, and somewhat disconnected from his heart as he grew into Apple. Out of this, he sometimes projected the worst stuff on me, faster than I could process through it. Yet as I slowed down and focused on my experience, I realize that things were not as he had so deftly chalked them up to be. In a certain way, I had been buried by Steve, the Zen master, and the Apple-- or the machine behind Apple. But when I stepped back into the history to quietly tell myself my story as I experienced it, the "her" story of it all, it was like waking up. Spin is a powerful thing. Interpretation is a powerful thing. But the truth is more powerful within your own context. A single voice does make a difference. We don't necessarily hear ourselves when others won't hear us. But in writing, I finally heard myself. I also discovered that forgiveness is a process and a very long haul, but a worthy one. A line from an ancient Hindu text had replayed in my mind for years. It was a basic principle of creativity, karmic law, and life. And it said, one must rise by that by which one falls. And here I found that by doing the work of writing, I was able to climb up and out of my tremendous self-loss into a lighter, truer being. Throughout the writing, as a discipline, I cross-checked some of the more complicated memories with people who were also there at certain points in the history and I got confirmations. They had understood things as I had, which was a great relief. This, in addition to 10 years of visionary painting, the six years of writing, and I not only recovered my story, I used the whole experience to understand the history through a wisdom and compassion trajectory. So that in essence, the book provided me the rare opportunity to review my life and take time to work it out and update it an ethical framework for my 50-year-old self. In the second 2/3 of the book, as I lived how bad things had been, I found that I was traversing what was for me how realms of such destitute feelings, that the only way I remember true loveliness was the little birds singing outside my windows in the morning. The work was really dramatic and extreme. But on the other hand, the terribleness had an upside. It enlivened my sense of determination. Diving into the dark and surfacing is the artistic process. And I'm no stranger to that. I just had never done it in words before and never on the same subject for so long. Long story short, I dug my heels in and decided I was going to get my book written or die doing it. It was a messy process getting into the do or die part, but eventually I realized that what I was really saying was the opposite. I was going to get the book written and live more fully as a result of it. Some people mistakenly think I'm obsessed and fascinated by Steve Jobs. But this is not accurate. I was obsessed by getting at the truth and fascinated by my revelations. It felt wonderful to speak, and be funny, and open my heart, and tell the truth. It felt to me like I was driving a little car over hill and dale, looking out the windows and reflecting on the views. I wanted to know why he had been so cruel after we had been so deeply in love. I just kept staying with the question until I got the bigger answers. I also wanted to put it in its place and move on. I did become more interested and appreciative of Steve's history, but it was only after I had renewed my perceptions of myself. As I mentioned before, I'd been concerned all along that my writing book this would be *** our daughter. And the way that worked is that the more I wrote, the more I felt it was going to be a bigger problem for her and the world if the world didn't have her mother's story and if I didn't become strong and clear enough to tell it. I think that what failed in Steve Jobs is as important as what succeeded. Both aspects should be studied, partly because he's so remarkable. Well, because he's so remarkable. Also I know that a woman's inner story may seem far less exciting as a man's worldly story. In fact, for women it may be that the inner story of a woman is more interesting than a man's worldly story. But beyond all this, I want my great-great-grandchildren, should I be lucky enough to have them, know what a bit of their grandmother's life and times, as well as your grandfather's. I think it will be healthy and happy for them because against all this dull expectations, I feel Steve and I were equals. He simply had more power because the laws favor men and money over women and children at this time. I hope you don't mind me being a little political. The other thing that truly inspired me to write is that in many ways my story is an all too familiar one. Many women have had their own experience with brilliant men. And truthfully, it's not just women who are suffering from the situation. Obviously, it's a destructive context for all of us. The world is dealing with a huge power imbalance, Wall Street, corporate heads, news corporations, that sort of confuse and drain people in their personal power, at least that's the apparent reality. So then I'd like to see a genius bar working to fix the brokenness at this level. Maybe we could call it the ethics bar. Eventually, I started to figure out that I could access the highest integrity inside myself by steering my writing between truth and kindness. If I could not say what had to be said is kindness, then I kept working to understand more deeply. If I could not tell the truth because it was too terrible, then I kept looking for ways to say things with more breath and allowance. The extremes of negative and positive relationship in the adult Steve Jobs and Chrisann Brennan were and still are too problematic to be public about. And sometimes I was thinking all the way through the book about Jung's "Red Book," the one he locked up for 70 years because he didn't think people were ready to take in the contents. And I completely understand his impulse to hold back. Steve expanded the spectrum in ways that went beyond the range of humanness. And I mean that in both the good and the difficult way. And I finally figured out I could approach the story if I stayed in the middle. Then I could express enough truth and that likely some readers were even going to be able to sense the shapes of the things I couldn't say. Another exercise I put myself through was to pose the question, if everything is love, if this whole universe is love, which is what the mystics support, and I am willing to believe, how do I understand love in the context of what happened between Steve and me? Love is law and law is based on love. What happened was lawless. Yet, I didn't want to make Steve look like a spot monster that was too big for me to handle. And I didn't want to make myself into a tiny speck of a victim that couldn't deal with it. That would have been way too easy. I wanted to transcend the polarization and the lawlessness. I wanted to find my power in the center of it all. I wanted a kind of equanimity, a true equanimity. I think that Steve was a remarkable empath, who became a colossal bully. I'm sorry for those of you who love him. I think he was a liar, a bully, a trickster, a thief. And I think he was a sociopath. Yet, he was also an honest, remarkable, mystic, creator, genius, visionary, who wanted to see people freed up through the tools he made. What a cluster. Another creative principle I found in another Hindu text says, divided into two parts I create. At first, I felt blimied and even lazy to parse through the polar opposites, his polar opposites. But then I became very interested in understanding the differences between Steve's light and dark sides because why else should I write this book? The independent spirit in me always got around to the same conclusion. I choose to be bigger than the cruelty and the indifference. I am going to tell the truth and I'm going to trust that I have the tools to do it without doing harm. Moreover, I may end up having to trust the pieces to fly and fall as they may. But I'm willing to wager that in the end, the truth, told well enough is a good thing. I call my book "The Bite in the Apple" and not "out of the Apple" because I wanted to recover wholeness of all that had been shattered. There are two trees at the beginning of the Bible. One is the tree of knowledge of good and evil and the other is the tree of life. I wanted to put the bite back in the apple and become the tree of life. No more talking snakes, no more blaming woman for the fall of man. Writing this book was my choice to return to my original spirit of wholeness by way of my own work, which was mine alone to do. So now-- what time is it? OK. OK. So now I want to talk about Steve's creativity. You all know more than I do, as I said in the beginning, about Steve Jobs' accomplishments. But I have probably thought more about how his early years shaped his creativity. I knew Steve was a genius when I first met him. Though if you ask our daughter, she'll complain that I think everyone is a genius. I hear her referring to her mother's myths and I think she worries I've fed her pretty lies. She is like Steve. She likes to get the facts straight. But I absolutely know what I'm talking about. I do believe everyone has genius in them. One difference between Steve and most other people is that he figured out what the work of his unique genius was and he didn't allow himself to be distracted from it. He never gave up and he never forgot that there was infinite potential in a finite amount of time. At the same time, I do feel he lost some sweetness-- the sweetness of life in the pursuit of all he accomplished. The time in which Steve and I came of age was marked by disillusionment with our parents' value system. The '50s were filled with the Cold War mentality, superficial materialism as the answer to a fulfilled life and also the inauthenticity of male and female role playing. And we found ourselves rebels. We were turning into rebels. But we weren't rebels without a cause. In fact, we felt that we should break the rules because they were inadequate to the sense that there was something bigger to be had. In 1983, I talked a writer from "Time Magazine," who told me that when he interviewed Steve Wozniak's and Steve Jobs' teachers in high school after Apple had started to succeed, he said that they all reported those years were a rare time at the school in every area of study because kids were so uncommonly creative and full of self-authority. That was that time. Later, I spoke with an attorney who went to a Catholic school in Santa Clara at the same time Steve and I were at Homestead. And he told me that his school was similarly struck by some kind of fierce originality, that came and went within a period of something like seven to 10 years. Now I think what a crazy alchemy, LSD, Eastern mysticism, the burgeoning technology of IBM, the brute power of Lockheed, all coming up at the same time, creating new combinations for re-envisioning design, the value of aesthetics in technology, planetary interconnectedness, and flower power. I'm going to put this up. This is another painting I did. Now I'm going to tell you a story that's a part of Steve's past. At first, it may not seem to connect to the theme of this talk, creativity. But you'll see why I think it does shortly. But first, take a trip back to 1972. The third time I met Steve's mother Clara Jobs, I was standing alone in the living room waiting for Steve. She came in and in an urgent way began telling me that they had adopted Steve, but that the birth mother had taken them to court because she didn't want her son raised by the Jobs. In 1955, Joanne Schieble, pregnant with Steve-- I actually don't know how to pronounce her name. My apologies-- had chosen a family that was well educated, wealthy, and Catholic, for her baby. But that couple decided that they wanted a girl. So the adoption agency gave Steve to Clara and Paul Jobs, who had none of those qualities. Clara told me that they had to fight to keep him. And then confessed that she had been terrified to love Steve for the first six months of his life for fear that they were going to take him away from her. At that, she just stared at me. And I saw in her face a deep, matter-of-fact guilt. And then she told me that even after they had won the case, when he was two years old he was so difficult a child to parent that she wanted to give him back to the agency. And I think she may have been trying to indicate a root cause to his cold side. But that day I was totally clueless and would be for some time because Steve was very good to me. Instead, I wondered why on Earth my new boyfriend's mother was telling me so much personal information. I was concerned about her and wondered in a simple 17-year-old way if they did come to love and cherish him. Not long after that conversation with his mother, Steve started warning me too. He told me on a number occasions and in a number of ways, he knew he was going to lose his humanity in the business world when he grew up. I didn't know what to think, starting with was this something that men knew and worried about? I also wondered, how did he know his future because I had no sense for mine. Back then, we were just young lovers. We moved in together the summer before he went to college, an idyllic setting, where we fell more in love. Then he left for Reed College and I returned for my final year of high school. Late that fall, Steve called and told me he'd dropped out of Reed, but was staying in Oregon to audit classes. It's important to know here that the crucial aspect in resolving the court case with Steve's birth mother was that Paul and Clara agreed to send him to college. In fact, it was the most crucial factor, maybe even the only, in getting his biological mother to leave him in their home. But Steve was deeply conflicted because he was well aware of Paul's anger and discomfort about spending so much money on his education. Higher education wasn't a part of the Jobs' experience or value system. Nor, apparently, was it to keep their legal obligations to the court and to the birth mother of their son. At 17, Paul and Clara let Steve decide. And he took things into its own hands and started auditing courses that interested him. I think it's instructive to look at what happened when Steve dropped out of school. Here we have a brilliant prince of a genius integrating the values of his working class parents, a guy who by any standard should've been given higher education. But instead rerouted himself for a different kind of emergence into adulthood, so as not too impinge or be a burden on these people whose feelings he cared about. So there's three things I'm getting from this-- that I've thought about with this. One, it seems to me that the breach in the contract was the beginning of a spiraling out of right order in the sense that it modeled the dropping of right regard for Steve's mother and the contract. One might think it doesn't matter because it was so long ago and they had put so much time in. But dishonoring the mother and the agreement in a court of law set a pattern, or it revealed one. Two, if Paul and Clara had been paying for the classes, they would have likely interfered, or Steve would have interfered with himself, of Steve's being so playful about his choices, dance, calligraphy, and Shakespeare. Reed College was after all known for its math and sciences, which is why it was a good fit for Steve. So the arts classes would have seemed anomalous to his obvious intellectual talents. Strike that. I think-- anyway, strike that. Three, after dropping out of school, Steve stumbled around for a while and suffered. Though he remained sweet and positive in his nature during that searching time, hitchhiking between the Bay Area and Portland, he was like a bird on the wire. And there was a deep rootlessness, one might say homelessness in him, as he tried to figure out what he was going to do with his life. I want you to know how hard that was for him. I was there. I saw it. It was painful. He was deeply worried about his life. Also I was disenchanted with him. So I was not of much help. But I don't think there was anything anybody could do for him. He had to find his own way. And yet he was finding his own way by looking at all possible failure. He knew there was something that was supposed to happen. Because just as he had told me that he was going to lose his humanity in the business world, he also told me that there was something big that he was going to do that would make him famous and wealthy. He didn't know what it was. And I feel that it was at that time when he didn't know what he was going to do and feared he might have missed it, that I saw him become mean spirited and stare future down-- good Freudian slip-- stare failure down. And I feel this was the beginning of his leadership development. Calamity, or rather the flip side of calamity, offers insight into the creative process. There is something about how everything that gets missed, gets tilled under, and then grows up into something greater. This is a truism I think we can all feel confidence in. Like things don't get missed. They go back under and find other ways to come back up. The irony, which is not the best word for what happened, is that even though he did not go to school, the personal computer is the tool that in the not so distant future will enable a truly class world education for every child on Earth, affordably so. The lesson, never underestimate the power for failure. It's a resource of immense untapped potential, because everybody keeps trying to do things right. The trauma of early childhood, the abandonment by both mothers in the first six months, probably had the most profound effect on Steve's creativity. In fact, I don't think there's anything that ever happened to him that he didn't end up using. So how might Steve's adoption and the resulting attachment disorder have affected his extremely sensitive creator self to make him a natural part of the development of a technology that will connect the world? In musing over this, I leaped to the idea that because Steve did not know what real connection with a mother was at such an important developmental stage, that he became a part of inventing a new kind of connection. Trauma can cut people down. But it could also wake people up. Some part of Steve woke up when you he separated from his birth mother-- I mean I think so-- and after that, because his adoptive mother didn't embrace him for six months, I think he was stuck, mobilized, wired, and focused to look for connection, at the same time not understand what he was looking for. This is my personal experience with him as well. And when we consider how technology is more and more replacing face-to-face, intimate contact, I wonder if there isn't something of his attachment disorder built right into the technology itself. Before this amazing techie world we exist in, I was around to see how Woz and Steve related to each other. The two geniuses, three years apart in age, met regularly as friends do and talked over their most recent ideas and discoveries. I didn't know what they were talking about and I didn't care. Instead, I loved watching the acceleration of their exchanges, the bright, happy flow, the shock of the new. They seemed to be very animated, jump up and down, talk over and around each other, in Paul's garage and other places too. It was like a duet of a great affection. Sometimes they could barely get their words out fast enough, finishing each other's sentences and laughing to acknowledge all that did not need to be said, because as Steve might say, insanely great minds think alike. Yet as true as that was, sometimes it went over the edge for me because there was something else going on. I'd forgotten about this other thing until I started writing. Their speech patterns could be so rapid fire, their tones so shrill, that it was as disturbing as fingernails on a blackboard. And I'm not exaggerating. It was awful. When the memory of this weirdness came back to me when I was writing my book, it occurred to me that something about how they were relating may well have been the beginning of what would later be coined the "reality distortion field" because it felt like something being torn out of coherence. As I say, it wasn't always this way, but just at those times when the sounds were so unbearable that I'd get myself out of hearing range. Often I'd sit in the living room at the Jobs's and wait for it to be over. And I did not ask myself why or what it was, but I do now. I think the technology has a double edge of both connecting and disconnecting people to and from each other, Steve and Steve, with a double edged sword that connected and disconnected things at the same time. Do we know what they were doing? Do they know what they were doing? I think we need to be more conscious and intense about asking what the technology is doing to us, biologically, emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually, creating a serious, serious business. Many people who came of age before the personal computer can remember such an extraordinary sense of beauty and potential in the air in the '60s and '70s and wonder what happened to all that promise. Anybody, like over 50, might remember this. You can ask them. They may have this memory. Did something truly over the top remarkable open up and then fail in some important way to fulfill itself? I live in Monterrey County right now. In the romantic history of Cannery Row and Steinbeck, there came a time when there were no more sardines in the sea. The industry was fished out and had closed down. And all the people who make their livelihoods off that industry were greatly alarmed and asked where did the sardines go? It was as if they were looking into the wine-dark sea, unable to see the bleeding obvious. The answer came by way of one Ed Ricketts, a scientist, a philosopher, a early ecologist, and a friend of Steinbeck, Henry Miller, and Joseph Campbell. He was a remarkable guy by all accounts. And he simply said, "they're in the cans." I believe the extraordinary vision that so many felt in the '60s and '70s got absorbed into the computer age, a kind of can if you will, so much mental, an intricate kind of can. And now I know I'm singing to the choir. I perceive I'm singing to the choir. So I'll just continue. I believe that we need new visions now. We upped the game with the computer. But I think it's taken up too much space in our imaginations, to the point of flattening them. There's too much focus on screens, on function, and on transaction. I feel we need to swing back to free up our imaginations for new kinds of questions, more balanced, with greater attention to integrity and nature and value of face-to-face intimacy of our humanness. I think a lot of people are haunted by Steve. His creativity was so over the top that I hear many question with anguish, what would Steve Jobs have done? What would he have gone on to create had he lived longer. And I want to say, I don't think this is the right question. His death is really sad. And he boggled the imagination of so many around the whole world. And yet if we want to show appreciation for all he did, why not take the best of his example as inspiration to ask new kinds of questions of one's self, for new kinds of frontiers? He was a unique contributor. And he got a remarkable ball up into the air. Yet I think we need other kinds of balls in air now too. A good question is a very powerful thing. Once it's been asked, the genius inside, the person who asked it of themself, or heard it asked, will work day and night, through their conscious and unconscious, to answer it. I mean if Jesus said of his own remarkable life, "this and more shall you do," then I think we have a directive to be mindful and imaginative-- why are we imaginative about the truth of everyone's creative capacity, not just potential, but a person's individual imperative. I think people are haunted by Steve Jobs not quite because of what he accomplished. But because he tapped into a level of creativity in himself in such a significant way that it suggests this too is possible. This is where it's haunted. I believe his creativity is at least as great as the computer, at least. Steve Jobs was enlightened. He was what enlightenment looks like in a business context. And yet because he never received the love of a mother when he was so young, he was an example of harnessing an awakened state without being emotionally integrated. This is quite a combination. And though he didn't do so badly, it does give us a clue into why he did not spearhead a new level of ecological and compassionate best business practices around the world when he, of all people, was so inspired and in a position to do so. One of the pillars of enlightenment is self love. And I think that bereft of the real heart connection with both mothers when it mattered, that Steve just kept building wealth to compensate. I'm not looking for blame. But I'm thinking more in terms of an agreed upon course correction into the future of technology. My impression is that the technology needs to be redesigned so that it works more harmoniously with the human energy system. I don't mean ergonomics. I'm talking about the development of the harmonics of the technology for the full dimension of our humanness. We all know a day spent on the computer can give us a feeling of a day lost, or I think we feel that way-- I'm talking for everybody-- somehow gone unlived, even if we got a lot done. There's an emptiness and an emotional flatness. It's as if we're making new forms all the time and the brilliance is uncontestable. But are we evolving and enriching our humanness and human experience? For example, here's an idea. And I'm almost finished. Consider the cell phone as the new cigarette. Its energy is gray and graying. People go off by themselves to use it. They reach for it unthinkingly as a distraction, with the same regularity. It's addictive and it lights up. So here we have an example of wanting to connect while the behavior actually blocks connection. In my imagination, I think that a company, one at the cutting edge of the market into the future of technology, they'd hire an unusual kind of workforce to start figuring out how to make the technology work with our biological, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual constitutions. OK, two more paragraphs. Our machines are cool. And thanks to Steve's exquisite sensibility and insistence, they are more beautiful than ever. But I think we are too impressed. They're supposed to serve us. We should not be serving them-- we should not serve them, nor pattern after them, nor be entrained by them. The technology is powerful. But the discernment is that it's only as good as the person who uses it being responsible to their own unique heart vision. And so I want to read something from my Henry Miller days. a quote. And since he wasn't just a little sexist, I've changed a few pronouns. We live in a different time now. He said, every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That's why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers and our own criteria of truth and beauty. Every man and woman, when she gets quiet and when she becomes desperately honest with herself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. There's no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all royalty, all poets, all musicians. We have only to open up and discover what's in here. [APPLAUSE] AUDIENCE: I want to revisit some of what you shared, both at the end and about your process in writing this book. And in particular-- so within Google we're a company creating software that people are using, even in particular around like authoring. So I'm curious, given some of the things that you had highlighted about sort a greater, like a greater connection to our humanity in terms of how we use computers for expression, for authoring, and some of the things that you had mentioned early on around approaching the book and writing cinematically, and a lot of the reflection that took place for you around steering this kind of middle course between extremes, I'm curious, do you see like ways that tools could be improved to support the kind of authoring-- to support you in the processes you went through for like another kind of expression? CHRISANN BRENNAN: I feel-- this is out there-- but I feel it needs to be bumped up to a whole other level. Now, is all this function. I mean that's another good question. And it's going to ring through me because there's no way I can quite answer that. And also I'm tremendously grateful for the tools that are because it was remarkable what I was able to do. I don't have an idea-- my biggest idea is that the energetics of the computer needs to be a higher frequency so that it's not cutting off-- OK, so this is what I think. I think the computer is cutting people off from their hearts. I think it's cutting them off from maybe even the reason they came here. If it's cutting off their hearts and their hearts have the reasons they came here, like their own destiny. So what I would like to see just a gifted workforce who can come in and who know multiple levels of possibilities and can design consciousness. It's weird. Because I don't really want computers to be babies, like new life forms. But still, I would like the computers-- I know that there are people-- and some of you could easily, probably have that in you. It's a calling. It's something that you're not-- only by magic and accident do you get trained for. So in terms of the functionality of how the computer can help remarkable people be more creative, I have no comment. I feel like the design of the machine itself needs to be-- I don't even know what words-- redone. AUDIENCE: Maybe transformed. CHRISANN BRENNAN: Yeah. AUDIENCE: To pick up on some of the themes you mentioned-- I mean I appreciated the analogy you gave around like a cell phone as the kind of like modern cigarette. When you're standing in line, it's a way to sort of pass the time. CHRISANN BRENNAN: Good, good one. I should add that. AUDIENCE: Yeah. And it's somewhat ironic because it's a device for communication and we use it for like disconnection, a disconnection from ourselves, a disconnection from the people around us. In terms of some of what you had just been mentioning, the way that computers and technology is conceptualized right now, it's very much around kind of spectacle and sort of what we see, seeing new things. And it sounds like I was hearing you get at how there may be possibilities around supporting a kind of reflection or introspection, like arriving at insights kind of internally. I'm curious if that's something that you're also envisioning as a possibility there CHRISANN BRENNAN: Well, it's an interesting thing. I mean the furthest I've gone with it is that people need time to be reflective with the human energy system. It's already so much-- it's light years ahead of anything we can do with the computer. So in terms of using the computer, I think it's a problem. That's exactly where the problem is-- AUDIENCE: Thank you. CHRISANN BRENNAN: --eclipsed. Yeah. AUDIENCE: Thanks. CHRISANN BRENNAN: Thank you. AUDIENCE: Yeah. AUDIENCE: Thank you for coming. AUDIENCE: Thanks for coming also. CHRISANN BRENNAN: Thank you. [APPLAUSE] [MUSIC PLAYING]