The “Crazy Ones” still gets to me

There’s a line in Apple’s old “Think Different” ad that I can’t shake:

The “Crazy Ones” still gets to me

There’s a line in Apple’s “Think Different” ad I can’t shake…“The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”

I’ve watched that ad hundreds of times. Maybe thousands.

Almost every person in that montage stands for something I’ve lived or lost or fought to understand.

  • Einstein — the sailor, the Jewish outsider, the mind that bent reality. He died the year I was born, 1955. Same as Bill Gates. Same as Steve Jobs.
  • Ted Turner — the first person to make news a twenty-four-hour conversation. I worked in newspapers when news still felt sacred. Turner took that instinct global. And yes, he’s a sailor too. He had a Cal 40 — a great boat. A similar boat, a Cal 39, appeared in Robert Redford’s film “All Is Lost.” I had a Cal 33, that I paid $33K for and sold for $11K to stay out of jail. And Ted was close friends with Frank Batten, who was also a sailor and who owned The Virginian-Pilot where I did my early design work for Sandy Rowe. I still have a hand-written note from Frank, congratulating me on my first redesign in 1986. Frank was rich, but extremely approachable and humble. He drove a Buick. Frank also created The Weather Channel, which I believe was sold for $3B.
  • Bob Dylan —Another Jewish troublemaker. Or as my friend Nelson Brown would say, a “shit disturber.” The musician who turned language into poetry and won a Nobel Prize.
  • Thomas Edison — When I struggled with TweenTribune.com, I kept hearing Edison’s voice: “I didn’t fail. I just found ten thousand things that didn’t work.”
  • Muhammad Ali — my photo of him ran on the front page of The New York Times, The Washington Post and on Saturday Night Live — twice. That’s only happened once in fifty years.
Transmitted via LD (long distance) from Allentown, PA to the AP in New York in 1980. It was sent via an analog technology called “Laserphoto.” It took 8 minutes to transmit a single black-and-white image. Slug: Heavy Weight.
  • Gandhi — humility as strength. I’ve been to India twice to write code with my friend Sudeep Goyal, who carries himself with the same, humble, quiet resolve.
  • Amelia Earhart — flight, risk, independence. I flew the same, high-performance airplane Tom Cruise flew in “American Made.” Four pilots died in the making of that film. If someone says to you “it’s just like flying,” they are lying. Because there is only one thing like flying. It’s called flying.
  • Frank Lloyd Wright — architecture as philosophy. I see software and systems the way he saw buildings. Probably another INTJ.
Falling Water
  • Picasso — art as reinvention. I went to art school and learned that design is just another way of thinking. Why did my intuition tell me to go to art school instead of the University of Pennsylvania? Because I knew it would be more fun to be a newspaper photographer than a lawyer, and that a fine art degree would give me an edge over the photo-j students who went to Missou. My idol was W. Eugene Smith, a photojournalist and an artist.
Tomoko in her bath, Minamata

When TweenTribune nearly broke me in 2011, I watched this ad over and over. It reminded me that the same stubbornness that isolates you is the thing that saves you.

The “Crazy Ones” ad isn’t about Apple. It’s about survival. It’s about believing that the refusal to quit is its own kind of genius.

Gordon Borrell told me for six long years, “never give up.” He was right. Gordon once hired me to design some banner ads for him. I created this slogan: “Borrell Knows.” Because he does.

That’s why I still watch this ad. Even now while I write these words.

I’m not crazy enough to think think I can change the world, but I know it would be crazy not to try.

But it ain't all rainbows. Sometimes I fail. Spectacularly. This is what it feels like:

My name is Alan Jacobson. I'm a web developer, UI designer and AI systems architect. I have 13 patents pending before the United States Patent and Trademark Office—each designed to prevent the kinds of tragedy you can read about here.

I want to license my AI systems architecture to the major LLM platforms—ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Llama, Co‑Pilot, Apple Intelligence—at companies like Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Facebook.

Collectively, those companies are worth $15.3 trillion. That’s trillion, with a T—twice the annual budget of the government of the United States. What I’m talking about is a rounding error to them.

With those funds, I intend to stand up 1,400 local news operations across the United States to restore public safety and trust. You can reach me here.