Interviewer: Are you a hippie or a nerd?
Steve Jobs: I'm clearly a hippie, all the people who I worked with [at apple] were clearly in that category too.
Interviewer: Why? Do you seek out hippies? Are they attracted to you?
SJ: Well ask yourself what is a hippy? This is an old word which has a lot of connotations but to me, ... remember I came of age in the 60s 70s. But the spark of that [era] was that there was something beyond what you see everyday, there is something going on in life beyond a job, a family, 2 cars in the garage, a television, a career. There is something more going on, there is another side of the coin that we don't talk about much. We experience it when there are gaps, when everything is not ordered and perfect... You experience this in-rush of something and a lot of people have set out throughout history to find out what that was, whether it's Thoreau or whether it's some kind of Indian mystic. The hippy movement got a little bit of that, they wanted to find out what that [rush] was about... Of course the pendulum swung too far the other way and it was crazy but there was a germ of something there. It's the same thing that causes people to want to be poets rather than bankers ... and that's a wonderful thing. And that same spirit can be put into products and those products can be manufactured and given to people and they can sense that spirit .... so I don't think that the most of the best people have worked with computers for the sake of working with computers. They've worked with computers because those are the medium which are best capable of transmitting some feeling that you have, that you want to share with other people.
(Thanks, Claire)
