I wanted this conversation to start with personal technology, not gadget nostalgia. Marc traces information as power from family history through Stanford, Apple, and General Magic — and why he refuses to be treated as a consumer.
Part 1 of 4 is the origin story: revolutions, media, and the idea that the tools in our hands should help us live a meaningful life, not just buy more stuff.
Transcript
Pablos: I saw is you started out very early, even in the 70s and through the 80s trying to explore these ideas about how do we make computers personal, make the technology personal. To me, that matters a lot, and I just think it’s a North Star to me. It always has been, and I think that it’s just not even part of the conversation. You know, when I look around, what I see is of a lack of vision and how these things can be made positive for people. There’s a lot of cases where people are building things and they’ll say, mean, it’s almost crass.
You know, they refer to people as consumers. I’m not a fucking consumer. I’m not here to just consume anything. I’m a person, and I want to have a meaning to my life, and I want these tools to help me with that. So I guess I know how I got there, and how I got there is because guys like you came before me, and so I could just draft off that. What I want to know is what gave you that? How did you get on that track? you know if i could
Marc: okay have
Pablos: done this 40 years ago or viewed it then what what is it that got you on that track my deep
Marc: family history is the whole okay good
Pablos: to know it
Marc: was traumatic for
Pablos: everyone that but revolutionary things can
Marc: have a horrible component to them. Hitler was a revolutionary idea, brilliant, genius level. We might have another one in 1600 then. But these guys are brilliant and cause chaos. So when I was a teenager, the Vietnam War was raging, and a lot of things were happening. I lived through five revolutions, simultaneous revolutions in a very condensed period of time in my adolescence. And the anti-war movement, I was a radical, I was an organizer. Counter-culture, I was a hippie, I was living in a commune, and I was a hippie. And feminism, which we did not know it by that name at all. it was for us it was of course you know yeah the women and we were just
Pablos: it’s called women’s liberation maybe even before before it had a name
Marc: before it was yeah the women in our community the women in our anti -war movement yeah so then i came to realize it was actually revolutionary was that environmentalism rachel carson just done silent spring book which was one of the triggers for the entire environmental movement. So there was a strong environmental revolution beginning to take place. And civil rights. I went to the South to do civil rights, organizing and voter registration in the Deep South. Almost got killed for it. So to me, revolutions are real.
I was born of revolutions. This may be more than you want to know. But when I was an organizer, when organizing a demonstration, a big one, anti-war. It was successful if TV came out. Walter Cronkite would do that. But if television had come out there to cover it, you were successful. So I thought television is power. And I’m going to go to Columbia University and become president of CBS News. Because that’s the power. So I went to Columbia, and I spoke with two professors Cowan and Friend Friendly, who had been presidents of CBS News.
They said, Mark, you don’t understand anything. Television news is about packaging audiences to sell to advertisers. It has nothing to do with anything that you want to do, this period. But communication is power. Stuck, and it became information is power. Computers have just started. And I was on that track by the mid-70s, or early 70s, to go figure out what is this information revolution. It’s powerful. Came to Stanford, did a PhD on information economy, went to the Aspen Institute, did a movie on the information society.
I was into it. Information, information, information. It always had for me then and now, even I’m doing all of this AI stuff, it’s not about the tools. It’s about, it’s human-centric. So I’m kind of a humanist at core. So the question is, how do these powerful technologies manifest on humans?
Pablos: Well, just before you go into that, you’re trying to make these films on information society. How did information become the center of gravity in that moment? Power. Because you correlated…
Marc: Jews were powerless when they were taken to the hospital. Yeah, yeah, right. Right? Everybody that I mentioned in civil rights and anti-war, they were powerless. Information is power. I want that. Whatever that is, I want
Pablos: that. Got it. So at that stage anyway, technology wasn’t part of the equation really. It was just other than TV has broadcast. but and
Marc: computers are booming and all that stuff is okay mainframes and just the beginning of many but I can see the power it was changes gonna change everything you can
Pablos: see that the computers were going to become a gravitational power for power
Marc: the power center and also the economic center
Pablos: I don’t think people believe
Marc: it for a
Pablos: long time I mean that would
Marc: have been my PhD
Pablos: Yeah, it was your PhD. Which
Marc: became a very famous PhD. It was translated into many languages. Okay. And
Pablos: so that’s how you ended up with this early conviction that computers were going to do something. I mean, you know, Revenge of the Nerds. You were right. Well,
Marc: it was post-industrial society. Okay. You know, Daniel Bell was my beacon. And we are post-industrial people
Pablos: where it’s
Marc: all about our mental skills. that would define success. So that’s how I got there.
Pablos: Yeah, OK. So
Marc: then the question was, well, what does it mean? And I started on this thing in 1972. And by 1988, I can give you all the details, but 1988, I was in a restaurant with my wife, then wife, near Broadway. It’s called . So I’ve been thinking, thinking, thinking. Darling, I want to show you something. And the restaurant had paper tablecloths with crayons. I grabbed a crayon, and I did three circles. And those three circles, one was compute, communication, and content. And I said, I figured it out.
So this is now 16 years. The computer is going to be in your hand. It’s going to be powerful. It’s going to be with you everywhere. It’ll become indispensable to you as a person. It’ll cover everything. Your relationship with yourself. Your relationship with loved ones, family, friends. Your relationship with commerce. Your relationship with absolutely everything is going to be in this hand. Communication was going to be wireless. because otherwise you couldn’t do what I just said. So everything was going to flip upside down. Things that were in the air, which was radio and television, were going to go in the ground. And things in the ground, which was long lines and all that stuff, was going to go up
Pablos: in the air.
Marc: So there’s that. And then content was going to be publishing and commerce. Content. Plus the content you generated. Everything you generated is everything in
Pablos: my case.
Marc: So this is 1980.
Pablos: But that’s the, you know, do you feel like you came to that conclusion because of the, you could see the technologies converging this way? Was that the driver or was it just some other? At
Marc: the center of the Venn diagram is the word you. Sure. You. So I started from that core, is who is the you in the information
Pablos: society? Because
Marc: I’d done those two things. Yeah. PhD in a movie. And you, empowered by what I was seeing in the information revolution, invented this. It came from the humanistic core of what would life be like when technology was like suffused into everything. Came up with that. You were at the center. And I came with that piece of paper to Apple. recruited by Larry Tesla and chief scientist you know we’re hippies
Pablos: okay good anti -war hippies so
Marc: the anti-war new him before yeah the anti-war hippie thing got me down wow and he said rocket let’s let’s see what can happen and I and so I went around Apple visited every board of director in their homes and conferences and places all over the country and put together I was kind of put together an amazing team.
Pablos: And what was that, was this before, I remember that like that Knowledge Navigator video, did you guys make that or was that
Marc: different? No, it already existed, but it was inspired, I was inspired by that.
Pablos: That existed before? Yes. Yeah, sure.
Marc: It had just been made, it was brilliant. I thought it was brilliant. Yeah, so whoever made that, I’ve never spoken to them.
Pablos: Yeah, yeah, okay.
Marc: I should look, I should actually…
Pablos: Yeah, that’d be cool. Yeah,
Marc: because I really was
Pablos: instrumental. And
Marc: it had already been in the culture a little bit in Apple. So anyway, so John Sculley was convinced, and he was super convinced, and he called, Bill Atkinson was convinced, and he called Andy Hertzfeld. That’s in the movie, the General Magic movie.
Pablos: I’ve seen the film. and
Marc: then that lit up and then everybody in the valley wanted to work at General Magic and off we went so Apple didn’t
Pablos: want to do it internally or what was the idea?
Marc: no I said I’m not
Pablos: doing this I’d
Marc: come in and I said hi everybody I have this idea and computers are not where Apple is headed the establishment went fuck you John Louis Gasset was president of Apple products and he wanted to kill me. So it was clear that there was going to be a lot of cultural resistance. And I needed to move fast. So I said to John Louis, we’re going out. And he, great, kind of introduced me to George Fisher, who was chairman and CEO of Motorola.
Pablos: Of which? Motorola, yeah. and
Marc: to Nori Oga, who was president of Sony, they lit up. And that was my board.
Pablos: Wow. Wow.
Marc: And they financed it, and then we got a total of 16 huge corporations.
Pablos: Isn’t it crazy to think about, like in a lot of ways, no huge corporation actually would finance a startup in that mode today? and you know partly because we just systematized all of early stage startup machinery and venture capital everything but
Marc: but to
Pablos: have a startup like an actual startup from the beginning get the heads of big corporations on the board and finance a startup it’s like it’s unheard of yeah So at
Marc: the CEO level, we brought in Sony, Matsushita, Hitachi, Toshiba, Phillips. At the CEO level, we brought in AT&T, NTT, France Telecom, K1 Wireless.
Pablos: I mean, I would think all of that would completely kill a startup. Do you think it did kill it? Okay. harm so not recommending that but it but that’s what you try to do
Marc: yeah that was and we were running basically a you know consortium of these very powerful companies we had to start every meeting of the founding partners council yeah
Pablos: yeah with
Marc: a speech from an antitrust wow because they were the entire market out okay and eventually their demands their paranoia about everything and their demands killed them well that’s