Speaker 1: Also media the phrase this man ruined the world. He
Speaker 1: gets used a lot, particularly by me on this show
Speaker 1: Behind the Bastards, which is the podcast you're listening to.
Speaker 1: But today, folks, friends, Romans, countrymen, actually people in Rome
Speaker 1: are not allowed to listen to this podcast based on
Speaker 1: a recent ruling by the Italian Supreme Court. But the
Speaker 1: guy we're talking about today is the man who ruined
Speaker 1: the world and his name is Steve Jobs. Now is
Speaker 1: that a hyperbolic statement? Am I just lying to you
Speaker 1: in order to get people to listen to try to
Speaker 1: oversell this podcast? Of course, because I'm a hack and
Speaker 1: a fraud. But you know it's not a hack and
Speaker 1: a fraud. Is our guest today, ed Zitron.
Speaker 2: Hello, and I am not a hack or a fraud.
Speaker 1: That's true, That's right. We are, however, the host of
Speaker 1: a podcast called Better Offline.
Speaker 2: Also true, that's.
Speaker 3: Part of this very cool zone media network, this very network.
Speaker 2: I'm one of one of you.
Speaker 1: Now, yeah, and he us want to Better Offline. You
Speaker 1: train your gimlet. I towards the tech industry, which dominates
Speaker 1: to a significant extent both the US economy and all
Speaker 1: of our lives, and provide I think a necessarily jaundiced
Speaker 1: look at what's going on there. And when you were
Speaker 1: talking about why is the tech industry the way that
Speaker 1: it is? Why are tech founders the way that they
Speaker 1: are the most influential person to answer that question is
Speaker 1: Steve Jobs, right, Like, there's really no competition for that title.
Speaker 1: He is the er founder in a lot of ways,
Speaker 1: and I want to get into him today. How much
Speaker 1: do you know about Steve Jobs?
Speaker 3: Like?
Speaker 1: What is your actual information on him as a human
Speaker 1: being and not just as like a CEO a founder.
Speaker 2: As a human being. I know very I've not seen
Speaker 2: the movies, I've not read the books. The idea of
Speaker 2: Walter Isaacson telling me anything is kind of annoying as
Speaker 2: a preface. Yes, but I do know that he was
Speaker 2: a deadbeat dad.
Speaker 1: He is a deadbeat dad. We'll be talking a lot
Speaker 1: about that. There's a There are two big movies about him.
Speaker 1: There's the The Ashton Kutcher one which is not very good.
Speaker 3: What did you just how did you just pronounce that man?
Speaker 1: Ashton Aston? I hate him. I hate him, Sophie, I
Speaker 1: hate him.
Speaker 2: Did you hear about the fashion social network that he
Speaker 2: invests the end? Yes?
Speaker 1: I do, Yes, I do also, and when we do
Speaker 1: our episode on him. Yeah.
Speaker 3: He also wrote a letter on behalf of his rapist seventy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Danny Masterson horrible man, disgusting, and I'll say this,
Speaker 1: he's a bad Steve Jobs. He's not good in the movie.
Speaker 1: It's not a good movie.
Speaker 2: No.
Speaker 1: Now, the worst sin is not him as Steve Jobs.
Speaker 1: It's Josh gadd who I do not like very much
Speaker 1: as Steve Wozniak.
Speaker 2: No, now, you can't have Josh Gadders was.
Speaker 1: No, there is as There is a much better movie.
Speaker 1: And Seth Rogan plays Wosniak, and Rogan is great casting
Speaker 1: for Wozniak. He is a really good was and that
Speaker 1: is the better movie. Neither of them is accurate, though
Speaker 1: neither of them is very accurate to the man's life.
Speaker 1: We're going to try to do better here. One of
Speaker 1: my sources for this episode is the book Becoming Steve
Speaker 1: Jobs by journalist Brent Schlender. It is I don't love it.
Speaker 1: It's slightly less dick righty than Walter Isaacson's biography, but
Speaker 1: it's still a lot more dick righty than it ought
Speaker 1: to be, which is why my favorite source on at
Speaker 1: least the early life of Jobs and the founding of
Speaker 1: Apple is the book Infinite Loop, which I think is
Speaker 1: a far better work of journalism than either of those.
Speaker 1: We also will talk a little bit about the Moritz book.
Speaker 2: The book by.
Speaker 1: Schlender, Becoming Steve Jobs has a forward or a preface.
Speaker 1: It has both a forward and a preface, which I
Speaker 1: find frustrating. But it's the forward or whatever is written
Speaker 1: by Mark Andresen right today. Andrewesen is the CEO massive
Speaker 1: venture capital guy, one of the big hypemen and investors
Speaker 1: behind the AI revolution, and it addition to believing that
Speaker 1: AI will literally become a god, he writes this quote,
Speaker 1: if you pulled the thousands of founders, you'd find that
Speaker 1: ninety nine point nine percent of them never met Steve.
Speaker 1: You'd also find that a fairly large number of them
Speaker 1: entered the tech industry after Steve passed away. But overwhelmingly,
Speaker 1: if you ask them who their hero is, who they
Speaker 1: have tried to learn the most from about how to
Speaker 1: build a company and how to have an impact on
Speaker 1: the world, Steve is number one on that list by
Speaker 1: a very wide margin. I see Steve's influence in everything
Speaker 1: they do. It's in their behavior in the polish and
Speaker 1: flare of their pitches, it's in the design of their slides.
Speaker 1: It's in the use of the word beautiful. Before Steve,
Speaker 1: no startup ever use the word beautiful. Now everything has
Speaker 1: to be beautiful. Every product needs to be fantastic out
Speaker 1: of the gate. Every product has to live up to
Speaker 1: its promise and bring delight to the lives of its users.
Speaker 2: So he just fucking lied about everything he's ever invested in.
Speaker 2: One of the things that Mark Andresen is responsible for
Speaker 2: is the churn investment in startups, pumping him with money
Speaker 2: to provide as much service as necessary to capture market
Speaker 2: share so that they can destroy incumbents. That doesn't mean
Speaker 2: perfect Christ, this man invested in Facebook.
Speaker 1: A lot of what he's saying is nonsense. They're like,
Speaker 1: I would say close to zero percent of tech products
Speaker 1: instantly delight users upon release, and in fact the norm
Speaker 1: is for them to be fucked up and for like
Speaker 1: customers to be beta testers. Right, Like that is more
Speaker 1: mostly how the industry works. But what Andresen is right
Speaker 1: about there where there is a legitimate insight, there is
Speaker 1: in his statement about jobs's influence on how founders see themselves,
Speaker 1: right yes, the men and women who run the tech
Speaker 1: industry today do not just admire Jobs, they want to
Speaker 1: be him. And that's a problem because he was a
Speaker 1: terrible person. So the story of Steve Jobs starts with
Speaker 1: his biological parents, and I'm going to use some very
Speaker 1: clinical terms for them for reasons that I think are appropriate.
Speaker 1: The man who is effectively his sperm donor is Abdulphata Jandali,
Speaker 1: who generally went by John Jendali, was a Syrian man
Speaker 1: whose family were outrageously wealthy. How wealthy, Isaacson notes that
Speaker 1: his father, Steve's grandfather, pretty much controlled the price of
Speaker 1: wheat in Syria. So John becomes a teaching assistant at
Speaker 1: the University of Wisconsin and he falls in love with
Speaker 1: Joanne Schleebel, in whose womb the clump of cells that
Speaker 1: would become Steve Jobs just stated. Joanne's family were German immigrants,
Speaker 1: and her father was a rich entrepreneur who was also
Speaker 1: kind of a piece of shit. He forbade his adult
Speaker 1: daughter from marrying anyone who was not Catholic. He threatened
Speaker 1: to cut Joanne off, which caused a problem because she
Speaker 1: was already pregnant with Steve. Now Joanne's father was dying
Speaker 1: but not fast enough, and she wasn't willing to risk
Speaker 1: being cut out of the will. So in fifty five
Speaker 1: she travels to San Francisco and she spends time with
Speaker 1: a doctor whose specialty was women who wanted to have babies,
Speaker 1: but not raise them. Right, they're going to give the
Speaker 1: baby up for adoption, you know. And Joanne's requirement because
Speaker 1: she's able to list some pretty strict requirements for who's
Speaker 1: going to adopt her kid, and one of the things
Speaker 1: she says is she wants them to be Catholics and
Speaker 1: they have to be college graduates. Now, the first couple
Speaker 1: that was going to take Steve they drop out, right like,
Speaker 1: they agree to take him and then they back out.
Speaker 1: They give him up basically right. I don't think we
Speaker 1: know why. But the doctor kind of has to find
Speaker 1: a family at the last minute who's going to take Steve,
Speaker 1: and he goes with the family that Joanne is not
Speaker 1: happy with because they are not college graduate Catholics. And
Speaker 1: in fact, the guy who's going to become Steve Jobs's
Speaker 1: father is a high school dropout, blue collar mechanic, and
Speaker 1: the guy who's going to be his mother is a
Speaker 1: high school graduate bookkeeper. Their names are Paul and Clara Jobs.
Speaker 1: Isaacson writes of them. When Joanne found out that her
Speaker 1: baby had been placed with a couple who had not
Speaker 1: even graduated high school, she refused to sign the adoption papers.
Speaker 1: The standoff lasted weeks, even after the baby had settled
Speaker 1: into the Job's household. Eventually, Joanne relented with the stipulation
Speaker 1: that the couple promise, indeed sign up pledge to fund
Speaker 1: a savings account to pay for the boys college education.
Speaker 1: And this is a messy situation. I've heard it said
Speaker 1: that like his adoptive mother says like she wouldn't let
Speaker 1: herself love him for the first like six months or
Speaker 1: whatever that she had him. I think she's being a
Speaker 1: little facetious there, but just because she doesn't know if
Speaker 1: she's going to have to give him up right And
Speaker 1: to be again perfectly clear, I've never heard any allegation,
Speaker 1: including from Steve. Everyone seems to agree his adoptive parents
Speaker 1: are deeply loving parents who dote on him rights. He
Speaker 1: is the best case scenario for a child who was
Speaker 1: adopted right where he is taken in very early by
Speaker 1: parents who devote themselves to him, but there's going to
Speaker 1: be a long debate over like how the fact that
Speaker 1: he is given up both by his birth parents and
Speaker 1: by this first couple that's going to adopt him, how
Speaker 1: that influences him, right. And it's kind of complicated by
Speaker 1: the fact that I think Isaacson is more sympathetic of
Speaker 1: his his birth mother and father than I am. He'll
Speaker 1: point out that like his birth mother, she's hoping to
Speaker 1: take Steve back after her dad dies. She and Gendali Mary,
Speaker 1: which is like, I think that's worse, right, Like that
Speaker 1: you're not even committing to adopt it. You're trying to
Speaker 1: give it up for a little while and then rip
Speaker 1: it away from the family. That's that's like, that's bad, right,
Speaker 1: That's pretty bad. And like, you have choice here. This
Speaker 1: isn't a situation in which she had no agency. She
Speaker 1: could have chose to like defy her father for her child,
Speaker 1: and she she didn't, And I think that's like a mark.
Speaker 1: That's bad. I would say, you know, yes, that's that's
Speaker 1: where I land on this. I will say, as a result,
Speaker 1: I think this kind of works out better for Steve
Speaker 1: because Paul and Clara are devoted in stable parents and
Speaker 1: Joanne and John Gendali are not right. They have one
Speaker 1: more kid together, but then they divorce, so I don't know.
Speaker 1: I feel like it's one of those situations where like,
Speaker 1: the people who wind up raising him are the people
Speaker 1: who are willing to commit to making him their priority,
Speaker 1: and so, you know, as a parent should do, as
Speaker 1: a parent should do. There's an interesting aside here, which
Speaker 1: is that Steve's biological sister, who he's going to meet
Speaker 1: like as a mature adult much later in life, winds
Speaker 1: up being the author, Mona Simpson, which is interesting, like
Speaker 1: she's like a fairly prominent author, and when I read
Speaker 1: this that, like novelist Mona Simpson was his biological sister,
Speaker 1: I was like, Oh, that's the name of Homer Simpson's mom.
Speaker 1: And I was just going to bring this up as
Speaker 1: a weird coincidence because I'm a Simpsons fan. But it
Speaker 1: turns out Mona Simpson was married to the Simpson writer
Speaker 1: who created the character that's Homer Simpson's mom, and the
Speaker 1: character is literally named after her.
Speaker 2: So there you God, yeah, that's kind of weird. These
Speaker 2: are the real conspiracy theories. Yeah, yeah, this is the
Speaker 2: actual shit that should be on above top se crew.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and there's this is a weird aside. There's a
Speaker 1: bizarre number of people with names that are famous for
Speaker 1: other reasons. Now in the Steve Job story that we'll
Speaker 1: be getting into, it doesn't mean anything, but it's peculiar.
Speaker 1: And this is the first.
Speaker 2: Place behind the boss that's promis Yeah, exactly. So.
Speaker 1: Steve is born February twenty fourth, nineteen fifty five, and
Speaker 1: when he is adopted, he is eventually named Stephen Paul
Speaker 1: Jobs by his adopted parents. Paul and Clara are kind
Speaker 1: of lower middle class. I think probably by the time
Speaker 1: he's in his late teens, they're like solidly middle class.
Speaker 1: His dad is initially like a repoman for a finance company,
Speaker 1: and the family lives in a suburb of Mountain View
Speaker 1: because it's a lot more affordable than nearby Palo Alto,
Speaker 1: right to make additional money. Paul, who is a very
Speaker 1: gifted mechanic. Right, he's not a tech guy, he's not
Speaker 1: an electronics guy, but he's great with cars. And one
Speaker 1: of the things he commits to do because they promised
Speaker 1: to start a college fund for Steve, he has a
Speaker 1: side gig spends most of Steve's like childhood buying old cars,
Speaker 1: fixing them up and selling them for a profit to
Speaker 1: like fund Steve's college fund. Right, he also builds.
Speaker 2: This is while entrepreneur is actually used to be.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, he seems pretty cool. Yeah, and he is.
Speaker 1: He is very much. He tries to inculcaid and Steve
Speaker 1: a love for mechanical work, and it doesn't fully get over.
Speaker 1: Steve's going to be reasonably competent with electronics, which his
Speaker 1: dad doesn't like. Steve like learns how to fix cars
Speaker 1: and stuff, but he never falls in love with it.
Speaker 1: But he does like spending time with his dad and
Speaker 1: his dad's workshop while his dad builds things. And what
Speaker 1: does get transferred from Paul to Steve is the fact
Speaker 1: that Paul isn't just someone who's good at fixing stuff.
Speaker 1: He has an appreciation for the aesthetics of how things
Speaker 1: are built. And Steve would later recall that, like his
Speaker 1: dad builds most of the family furniture, and he's the
Speaker 1: kind of guy who when he's making a bookcase, he
Speaker 1: doesn't just put like a thin sheet of like board
Speaker 1: like basically like like particle board at the back of
Speaker 1: the bookcase. He uses like real wood for that too,
Speaker 1: even though not really going to see it, because he's
Speaker 1: one of those guys where he's like what it matters
Speaker 1: how the whole thing is constructed, you know, And he's
Speaker 1: going to one of the kind of the earliest lessons
Speaker 1: Steve is going to learn is he's going to walk
Speaker 1: him through like how cars are designed the way they are,
Speaker 1: and like what stuff he appreciates about the industrial design
Speaker 1: of cars, and Steve is going to be primarily an
Speaker 1: aesthetics guy. When we talk about the stuff that Steve
Speaker 1: Jobs was actually a genius at, it's understanding what people
Speaker 1: want to hold in their hand, you know, Like that's
Speaker 1: a thing that he was legitimately probably the best at
Speaker 1: in the industry. Is like knowing people, this is what
Speaker 1: people tactile in a tactile sense want, and he gets
Speaker 1: that from his adopted father. Paul would note that he
Speaker 1: wasn't really interested in getting his hands dirty, but yeah,
Speaker 1: the two get a lot of bonding time in It's
Speaker 1: pretty important to note the extent to which Paul gives
Speaker 1: Steve kind of the skill that is going to be
Speaker 1: like one of his primary assets when he's when he
Speaker 1: gets into business. So it's a pretty good childhood that said,
Speaker 1: he still deals with, you know, the fact that he
Speaker 1: has adopted the fact that he was given up is
Speaker 1: to some extent, kind of this cross he has to bear.
Speaker 1: When Steve is six or seven, a girl on his
Speaker 1: street finds out that he had been adopted and asks him, so,
Speaker 1: does that mean your real parents didn't want you? Which
Speaker 1: is the kind of like casually horrible thing children say.
Speaker 2: To each other.
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, And Steve would later recall quote, lightning bolts
Speaker 1: went off in my head. I remember running into the
Speaker 1: house crying and my parents said, no, you have to understand.
Speaker 1: They were very serious and looked me straight in the eye.
Speaker 1: They said, we specifically picked you out. Both of my
Speaker 1: parents said that and repeated it slowly to me, and
Speaker 1: they put an emphasis on every word in that sentence.
Speaker 1: And this is like there's a lot of argument. A
Speaker 1: lot of people who were friends with him and knew
Speaker 1: him will say that, like the fact that he was
Speaker 1: given up causes this deep insecurity in him, and it's
Speaker 1: kind of the root of a lot of the unpleasantness
Speaker 1: in his personality. A lot of like the cruel stuff
Speaker 1: that he'll do, is this damage she suffers as a
Speaker 1: result being given up Steve never really admitst that himself.
Speaker 1: He doesn't seem to feel that was the case. And
Speaker 1: while he's not the most reliable source on himself, I
Speaker 1: do think that, like it's kind of worth noting his
Speaker 1: attitude is that, like I'd ever felt abandoned, I felt
Speaker 1: chosen right.
Speaker 2: Also, I would not be surprised if for the rest
Speaker 2: of his life he thought of that girl who said
Speaker 2: it knows her name, her social Security number, her address,
Speaker 2: and she can't use iCloud.
Speaker 1: Yes, yeah, I think it's it's probable that like both
Speaker 1: of those things are are factors, right, that he is
Speaker 1: both because of how other people treat him as a
Speaker 1: result of this, Like he grows up with a chip
Speaker 1: on his shoulder, and also he grows up feeling special
Speaker 1: because unlike most kids, his parents like specifically picked him
Speaker 1: as an individual, Like didn't just decide to have a kid,
Speaker 1: but like saw him before he was their kid and
Speaker 1: chose him. And that has an impact on how he
Speaker 1: feels about himself. Right that said, You're going to get
Speaker 1: a lot of different accounts on this. One of his
Speaker 1: old friends told Isaacson, I think his desire for complete
Speaker 1: control of whatever he makes derives directly from his personality
Speaker 1: and the fact that he was abandoned at birth. He
Speaker 1: wants to control this environment, and he sees the product
Speaker 1: as an extension of himself. Isaacson quotes another friend who
Speaker 1: claims this made Jobs independent because he was quote in
Speaker 1: a different world than he was born into. I don't
Speaker 1: know how much you want to take all of that seriously.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that feels like fantasy foot bullshit, Like you just
Speaker 2: kind of guessing because you'll never get You would have
Speaker 2: never got the truth out of Jobs, and you're certainly
Speaker 2: not going to get so many people have been both
Speaker 2: scorned and made rich by him. It's almost impossible to
Speaker 2: gauge it is.
Speaker 1: And it's like, yes, he is a control freak, but
Speaker 1: most control freaks were not adopted, right, So I don't
Speaker 1: know that we need to assume that's why, Right, you
Speaker 1: could he could just as easily get it from the
Speaker 1: fact that his parents. One thing you can criticize them
Speaker 1: for is they're too doting on him, right, Like that
Speaker 1: could just as easily be responsible for this kind of
Speaker 1: trolling nature is the fact that he always has as
Speaker 1: a child near total control of his environment because his
Speaker 1: parents basically don't say no to the kid. Right, you know,
Speaker 1: a couple of ways this could have gone. One of
Speaker 1: the things that's a big influence on him is that
Speaker 1: growing up where he did in California, most of his
Speaker 1: neighbors are tech guys. Right. This is the tech industry
Speaker 1: of the sixties the seventies, where the bulk of it
Speaker 1: is centered around aerospace and defense. And several of these
Speaker 1: guys take a shine to Steve and he'll go and
Speaker 1: visit them as they're tinkering in their workshops and they're
Speaker 1: tinkering Unlike his dad, who's like messing around with cars
Speaker 1: and furniture, they're tinkering with like speakers, with electronics. Right.
Speaker 1: So he learns a lot of lessons from them, and
Speaker 1: at kind of one crucial point when he's a young kid,
Speaker 1: he's talking to his dad about one of the projects
Speaker 1: these guys has showed him, and his dad says, well,
Speaker 1: that's not the way speakers work, and he like corrects
Speaker 1: his father because he knows more about that stuff than
Speaker 1: he does, and he kind of has this blinding realization,
Speaker 1: which I do think maybe it's a little bit of narcissism.
Speaker 1: He comes to this like blinding realization, Oh my God,
Speaker 1: I'm smarter than my father, right, which.
Speaker 2: I don't know that he really is, but what an
Speaker 2: insane thing to think.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it gets to this the way tech guys
Speaker 1: think about intelligence, which is it is entirely based around
Speaker 1: how good you are at like knowing how to do
Speaker 1: the two things they care about, as opposed to like,
Speaker 1: but but you can't do all this other stuff, right,
Speaker 1: Is the fact that you're good at coding make you
Speaker 1: smarter than a guy who's a heart surgeon or a
Speaker 1: guy who's a really good automotive mechanic. Well, no, those
Speaker 1: are different things, and they're all intelligences, you know. But
Speaker 1: Steve is going to be like, well, because I understood
Speaker 1: electronics better than my dad did, even though there was
Speaker 1: a lot of shit he knew better than me, I
Speaker 1: realized I'm smarter than.
Speaker 2: Him, right right? And because he did speak, Yeah.
Speaker 1: Because he knows speakers now, and he describes he feels
Speaker 1: like shame for thinking this, and I'm I'm sure these
Speaker 1: two things war for themselves in his young mind, but
Speaker 1: it does kind of say a lot about him, and
Speaker 1: that's how he interprets this. One's the that Steve does
Speaker 1: understand at a pretty early age, his mom and dad
Speaker 1: are kind of willing to roll over for him, you know,
Speaker 1: and he is able to push them consciously for things
Speaker 1: that he wants to get. He later recalls that they quote,
Speaker 1: since I was special and were willing to defer to
Speaker 1: my needs, and this feeling that he is special and
Speaker 1: that the world and people around him will naturally ben
Speaker 1: the need of his wishes. This is more critical, I
Speaker 1: think than anything in creating Steve's conception of himself. Now,
Speaker 1: while his parents coddled him, the rest of the world
Speaker 1: is harsher to him. And the gap between those two realities,
Speaker 1: the way his parents treat him and the way the
Speaker 1: world is makes Steven a kind of a cry baby.
Speaker 1: And I'm going to quote now from the book Infinite
Speaker 1: Loop by Michael Malone. Steve was also a whiner when
Speaker 1: he took swim classes at the Mountain View Dolphins Swim Club.
Speaker 1: One of his classmates, Mark Wozniak, yet more evidence that
Speaker 1: Silicon Valley has always been a very large small town,
Speaker 1: would recall he was pretty much a cry baby. He'd
Speaker 1: lose a race and go go off and cry. He
Speaker 1: didn't quite fit in with everybody else. He wasn't one
Speaker 1: of the guys. In fact, he was one of the
Speaker 1: boys found in every class who get the stuffing knocked
Speaker 1: out of them on a regular basis, And tears are
Speaker 1: a constant thing in jobs relation with others. Every when
Speaker 1: you read stories about him in the early days of Apple,
Speaker 1: every like four pages he's weeping in a meeting because
Speaker 1: somebody challenges him on something. He cries openly in business
Speaker 1: meetings constantly. Anytime there's a fight and someone's like, Steve,
Speaker 1: you're wrong, will start fucking crying.
Speaker 2: That is actually the best thing I've ever heard is
Speaker 2: Steve Joe's weeping the weepy weep way You've.
Speaker 1: Got You've got two kinds of like big tech executives.
Speaker 1: You've got Steve Jobs crying because someone disagreed with him
Speaker 1: and then like going behind their back to get them fired.
Speaker 1: And then you've got Steve Balmer, former CEO of Microsoft,
Speaker 1: throwing chairs at people in staff meetings.
Speaker 2: How just I don't want to skip ahead too much much,
Speaker 2: but like, how long did he cry for? Did he
Speaker 2: cry throughout his whole career or was it just the beginning.
Speaker 1: I think it's just his first period of time at Apple, right,
Speaker 1: because he's he's there for a while, he helps found it,
Speaker 1: he against gets forced out, then he starts a couple
Speaker 1: of companies, and we'll talk about all this later. I
Speaker 1: don't think he's as much of a tears guy when
Speaker 1: he comes back to lead out.
Speaker 2: That's a huge shame because I would have really loved
Speaker 2: it if he were just constantly crying.
Speaker 1: He is well into his thirties, that guy, So we
Speaker 1: can say Stacks now. His early memories. It's also worth
Speaker 1: noting involve a fair amount of financial precarity, right, which
Speaker 1: has a significant impact on him. Paul, when he's a
Speaker 1: young kid, takes night classes to get a real estate
Speaker 1: license in the hope of improving the family financial situation.
Speaker 1: And then the bottom falls out of the market and
Speaker 1: the job's family spends a year or so kind of
Speaker 1: barely scraping by. His mom has to take on another job.
Speaker 1: His family is to take out a second mortgage. There's
Speaker 1: a moment when his fourth grade teacher asks him what
Speaker 1: is it you don't understand about the universe, And his
Speaker 1: response is, I don't understand why, all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: my dad is so broke, and I identify with that.
Speaker 1: I had a similar my dad took training to become
Speaker 1: like an Oracle col database administrator, and like got a
Speaker 1: new job in tech right as the tech industry collapsed
Speaker 1: in the first dot com crash, and it like ruined
Speaker 1: our family for a while. My mom had to take
Speaker 1: on extra Like that's a traumatic thing for a kid, right,
Speaker 1: realizing that your parents are just scrambling to get by,
Speaker 1: and that's going to have an impact on how he
Speaker 1: treats money, which is, by the way, like a dick.
Speaker 1: He is like weirdly stingy, especially to like his own child.
Speaker 1: But we'll get to that. This combination of financial distress,
Speaker 1: of feeling like you's smarter than everyone, and of being
Speaker 1: bullied leads to a kid who kind of compulsively acts
Speaker 1: out and as an adult jobs Tells his biographer Isaacson, quote,
Speaker 1: I had a good friend named Rick Farentino, and we'd
Speaker 1: get into all kind sorts of trouble. We made little
Speaker 1: posters announcing bring your pet to school day. It was
Speaker 1: crazy with dogs chasing cats all over and the teachers
Speaker 1: were beside themselves. Another time they convinced some kids to
Speaker 1: tell them the accommodation numbers for their bike locks. Then
Speaker 1: we went outside and switched all of the locks and
Speaker 1: nobody could get their bikes. It took them until late
Speaker 1: that night to straighten things out. When he was in
Speaker 1: third grade, the pranks became a bit more dangerous. One time,
Speaker 1: we set off an explosive under the chair of our teacher,
Speaker 1: Miss Thurman. We gave her a nervous twitch. What the.
Speaker 2: Steve jumps the djoko?
Speaker 1: Yeah you would go to prison for that today, school
Speaker 1: resource officer shoot you?
Speaker 2: Yeah, how fuck o, little man.
Speaker 1: It's the My dad would tell me stories of like, yeah,
Speaker 1: we used to all have everyone had a pocket knife
Speaker 1: in school, and like, you know, my family, who grew
Speaker 1: up more in Oklahoma when in like the seventies, was like, yeah,
Speaker 1: kids would take their rifles to school, like and they
Speaker 1: keep them in their cars and shit during deer season.
Speaker 2: Would yeah, you don't.
Speaker 1: People just don't do that anymore.
Speaker 2: You'll go to dude too woke, Yeah, dude of woke.
Speaker 1: So this is all pretty I mean, I think that
Speaker 1: is a little extreme even for the time, But neither
Speaker 1: Paul or Clara ever disciplined Steve for this behavior. Paul
Speaker 1: even tells his teachers, if you can't keep him interested,
Speaker 1: it's your fault. Basically, if he's not challenged enough at school,
Speaker 1: it's because you guys are doing a bad job as teachers.
Speaker 1: And whatever he does is justified, which is maybe not
Speaker 1: the best lesson to teach him.
Speaker 2: This is straight up what they told me with my
Speaker 2: Bengal cats. Yeah, if they're two bits, like if they're
Speaker 2: meowing all the time, it's because you're not entertaining them. Like,
Speaker 2: that's right, Jesus.
Speaker 1: If only someone had given Steve one of those like
Speaker 1: balls of yarn that you like, hang from the roof
Speaker 1: so he can big wheel. Yeah, it's real that he can.
Speaker 1: He can spin around. That's all he needed. Even when
Speaker 1: Steve he gets kicked out of the first grade at
Speaker 1: one point, and he's still not punished for it, and
Speaker 1: so again he grows up. And I'm mixed about this.
Speaker 1: I think we generally kids are punished more often than
Speaker 1: they ought to be for shit that they probably shouldn't
Speaker 1: be punished for. But also at a certain point, if
Speaker 1: you're putting explosives under your teacher's chair, you probably should
Speaker 1: be punished.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I feel like Palo Alta Kaita needs to be
Speaker 2: put down, like Jesus fucking So, there were signs early then.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, yes, that he was. He was he does
Speaker 1: not really care about how his actions harm other people, right,
Speaker 1: pretty early. Thing that we can see happening here, and
Speaker 1: you know, part of what he's going to grow up
Speaker 1: believing is that when he behaves badly at someone else's fault.
Speaker 1: You know, it's the school's fault for making him memorize
Speaker 1: stupid stuff rather than stimulating him.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: One teacher does eventually figure Jobs out right, and she's
Speaker 1: able to turn him into an excellent student. And the
Speaker 1: way she does this, I've never heard of a teacher
Speaker 1: doing this. She pays him when he does his homework,
Speaker 1: She gives him money to do his homework, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: which is and eventually Shot transitions to like giving him
Speaker 1: little gifts, these like mechanical toys that he has to build,
Speaker 1: and this works. It turns him into a good student.
Speaker 1: I don't know that that's necessarily the lesson you want
Speaker 1: to teach a kid, but Steve would later claim that
Speaker 1: without her, he thinks he would have gone to jail.
Speaker 1: And I think there's this is actually something I think
Speaker 1: Steve has some insight into himself about Steve Jobs very
Speaker 1: well could have become a criminal. Right, he has all
Speaker 1: of the things that a criminal needs. He doesn't quite
Speaker 1: go that way, but like he's willing to break the law,
Speaker 1: he's willing to hurt and cheat people. And maybe he's
Speaker 1: right that like this teacher, because she teaches him that
Speaker 1: like following within the lines leads to money, that's kind
Speaker 1: of the path he goes on the rest of his life.
Speaker 2: So maybe she.
Speaker 1: Did stop him from being a criminal and turn him
Speaker 1: into something that maybe did more harm in the Laura,
Speaker 1: But I don't know, that's a debatable. Isaacson talked to
Speaker 1: this teacher decades later when he was writing his book
Speaker 1: about jobs, and her favorite memory of Steve was at
Speaker 1: the school's annual Hawaii Day, where everyone in the class
Speaker 1: got to wear a Hawaiian shirt. Steve showed up without one,
Speaker 1: but in pictures from the day he's wearing one because
Speaker 1: he convinces another kid to give him the shirt off
Speaker 1: of his back, which tells you the degree which he's
Speaker 1: already learning how to manipulate people quite well. So his
Speaker 1: teachers eventually advised his parents that he should be skipped
Speaker 1: ahead two grades. Now they only move him ahead one grade.
Speaker 1: I think his parents are like two is too far
Speaker 1: that's going to make him, which is probably, you know,
Speaker 1: a responsible call. This seems to have contributed to his
Speaker 1: parents viewing him as something of a marvel, and it
Speaker 1: certainly adds to the bullying right before eighth grade starts.
Speaker 1: In fact, the bullying is so bad that he's like,
Speaker 1: I refuse to go to school. Right fall comes around
Speaker 1: and they're about to start, and he's like, I'm not
Speaker 1: going to go to school, like I will drop out.
Speaker 1: I will refuse to attend unless you move us to
Speaker 1: a more expensive neighborhood and enroll me in a better school. Right,
Speaker 1: and I'm going to quote from Michael Malone describing the
Speaker 1: threat he makes to his parents over this. When Steve
Speaker 1: Jobs made his ultimatum, the most amazing thing happened. His
Speaker 1: parents agreed. His family moved to a safer and more
Speaker 1: expensive neighborhood in Sunny Vale, despite the fact that they
Speaker 1: will working extra jobs just to stay solvent, despite the
Speaker 1: fact that it meant an even longer commute for his father,
Speaker 1: and pulled his sister out of elementary school. This was power,
Speaker 1: and Stephen Jobs learned its lesson great Yep, maybe not
Speaker 1: a great lesson to teach this kid.
Speaker 2: Yep.
Speaker 1: But I by using threats, he can manipulate reality.
Speaker 2: None of this, and I've been in the tech industry
Speaker 2: about fifteen years, none of this has ever come up
Speaker 2: with People including people like o Malek or Walt Mossberg
Speaker 2: have talked about Steve Jobs so much their eyes blade.
Speaker 2: No one ever talks about the fact that he is
Speaker 2: some combination of like Dennis the Menace and the Joker.
Speaker 1: He has did it yet, just and that's next with
Speaker 1: the fucking Joker. It's this is why I like I
Speaker 1: use because Isaacson talks. One thing Isaacson is good at
Speaker 1: is getting access. So he does you have to use
Speaker 1: his biography because there's a lot of stories you get
Speaker 1: from people who grew up with Steve that you only
Speaker 1: get in Isaacson's book.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: But Malone's book Infinite Loop because Malone hasn't bought the
Speaker 1: kool aid. And also, Infinite Loop is written before Jobs.
Speaker 1: It's kind of published like a year or two after
Speaker 1: he comes back to Apple, but it's before he's turned
Speaker 1: Apple into the wealthiest and most powerful company in the world. Right,
Speaker 1: So the story of Steve Jobs is different. When Malone
Speaker 1: writes Infinite Loop, it's the story of a man who
Speaker 1: founds a company, makes a lot of money, makes a
Speaker 1: series of horrible decisions, and almost drives the company into bankruptcy. Right,
Speaker 1: And so as a result, it's a much more cynical
Speaker 1: look at jobs, and so you get, I think, a
Speaker 1: more tempered view of who he is as a person.
Speaker 1: It's not nearly as popular a book as Isaacson's, but
Speaker 1: I think it's a better one. So anyway, we use
Speaker 1: a lot of books for these episodes. But you know
Speaker 1: who hates books and reading in general.
Speaker 3: Robert, what who are you referring to.
Speaker 1: The sponsors of our podcast, Sophie?
Speaker 3: You know, I hope it's an ad for public libraries
Speaker 3: and how great they are.
Speaker 1: Listen, folks, you don't need to learn how to read.
Speaker 1: All you need to know how to do is type
Speaker 1: your credit card information into the websites of our sponsors.
Speaker 3: Did you see that that the public libraries in New
Speaker 3: York are closed on the weekends, but they had funding
Speaker 3: for the NYPD dance troupe?
Speaker 2: Yeah, and they were. They were terrible. They weren't. It
Speaker 2: was it was they weren't.
Speaker 1: Even in time. Everyone's read Moby Dick. What we haven't
Speaker 1: seen as cops fail at dancing.
Speaker 2: Then someone just throws an kon onto the stage and
Speaker 2: they just unloaded that this thousand sty good stuff.
Speaker 1: All right, here's ads and we're back. So, you know,
Speaker 1: Steve is coming up. He's in school around the same
Speaker 1: time Gates is, you know, around the same time that
Speaker 1: whole first gin of tech founders is. And they all
Speaker 1: have a similar experience, which is they all in counter
Speaker 1: computers early on and before most people in the country,
Speaker 1: including most adults, have any firsthand experience with computers. Bill Gates,
Speaker 1: it's because his parents send me to a fancy private
Speaker 1: school and they buy a computer for the school. In
Speaker 1: Steve's case, it's because he joins the Explorers Club, which
Speaker 1: is like, you know, Hewlett Packard, the company. Hewlett Packard
Speaker 1: is like the chief sexy tech company of the day.
Speaker 1: Right now, it's kind of a boring brand, but Hewlett
Speaker 1: Packard is like innovative. They are like the smartest motherfuckers
Speaker 1: in the state, right Like that's how people think about HP.
Speaker 1: And HP has this thing that's like that. It's like
Speaker 1: HP's boy Scouts, right It's like a tech focused boy
Speaker 1: Scouts where kids get you know, you can go into
Speaker 1: the HP offices, and these kids can get access to
Speaker 1: a computer and like code on it, put in. And
Speaker 1: at this point, people don't have individual computers. Computers are
Speaker 1: things that are like owned by large institutions. You don't
Speaker 1: just like have one in your house, right, it's not
Speaker 1: really feasible, you know. And so the fact that Steve
Speaker 1: gets first hand experienced with a computer here is really noteworthy,
Speaker 1: and he falls in love with it. He's like fascinated
Speaker 1: with this thing. And one of these things that Steve
Speaker 1: has from an early age is he has incredible intuition
Speaker 1: about certain things. Right, he understands what people want in technology,
Speaker 1: and he understands what's going to be big in technology,
Speaker 1: and as soon as he gets his hands on a computer,
Speaker 1: he's like, this is the future. And he also from
Speaker 1: an early age, is really good at getting what he
Speaker 1: wants out of people. He's working on a project for
Speaker 1: the Explorers Club at one point and he needs some
Speaker 1: like hard to find parts that HP makes, and they're
Speaker 1: not in any like catalogs. So he he finds the
Speaker 1: CEO of HP's home phone number and he calls him
Speaker 1: and is like, hey, I need these parts. He like
Speaker 1: talks him into sending the parts over so that he
Speaker 1: can like finish this project. And you know the guy
Speaker 1: he's talking to is Bill Hewitt. You know, he's the
Speaker 1: CEO and he's one of the founders of the company.
Speaker 1: And once he makes he doesn't just make this connection
Speaker 1: get some parts out of him. He starts because Hewitt's
Speaker 1: kind of pressed with this kid and his gumpchin. He
Speaker 1: pushes until Hewitt gives him a summer job at HP
Speaker 1: as well. And this is going to be Steve's first job.
Speaker 1: So you know, that's a pretty that shows fairly few
Speaker 1: children are able to do something like that, right have
Speaker 1: the wherewithal to do that, Steve Dutz and that's noteworthy. Now,
Speaker 1: probably the single most important moment of his childhood comes
Speaker 1: when he is sixteen, and this is when he meets
Speaker 1: another kid, another Steve named Steve Wohniak. The WAWS, as
Speaker 1: he came to be known, is several years older than Steve,
Speaker 1: and he is he is the kind of guy all
Speaker 1: of these tech founders want to be Steve jobs all
Speaker 1: of them also pretend to be Steve Wosniak, because Wosniak
Speaker 1: is the thing that almost none of these guys are.
Speaker 1: He is a legitimate technological genius and also a legitimately
Speaker 1: nice guy and a very nice a very nice man.
Speaker 1: I literally met him two weeks ago and we just
Speaker 1: talked about tech shit for like an hour, and he
Speaker 1: was the sweetest guy and knew what he was told
Speaker 1: and about ye like, and I've met a lot of
Speaker 1: founders and I've met Steve Jobs obviously, and they're usually
Speaker 1: it's very fucking weird. He's just like a nice guy,
Speaker 1: like nice old man who's just like loves tak. Yeah
Speaker 1: that's a shame they know more of them like him. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it is a shame, and it's and he is one
Speaker 1: of these guys. He is from a very early age,
Speaker 1: just an absolute genius at technology. He and Steve go
Speaker 1: to the same high school. He's like, I think four
Speaker 1: or five years older than Steve, so he's graduated by
Speaker 1: the time that they meet, but he's he's still he's
Speaker 1: hanging out with some of lower classmen that he knew
Speaker 1: when he was still in school. And one of these
Speaker 1: guys is a friend of Steve's. And that's how Steve
Speaker 1: Jobs and Steve Wozniak meet. Now. The Waws is the
Speaker 1: son of a Lockheed engineer and he's he's one of
Speaker 1: these people who's always innately brilliant with circuits and machines.
Speaker 1: One of the things he's famous for is he's he's
Speaker 1: able to a big part of early computing is figuring
Speaker 1: out how to do things with fewer chips, basically, and
Speaker 1: he is great at that at efficiency, because the more
Speaker 1: efficient you make it, the more shit you can fit
Speaker 1: into a smaller package effectively. I'm people who are real
Speaker 1: tickets are going to yell at me for like summarizing
Speaker 1: it that way, but he is like the best at
Speaker 1: optimizing shit to make it more efficient.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: One of the first things he builds is a digital
Speaker 1: it's called a blue box, and it is at the time,
Speaker 1: the way the phone system works is phones send tones
Speaker 1: to each other in order to transmit commands, right, And
Speaker 1: so if you can mimic the tone that a phone
Speaker 1: sends the central machine or whatever to say like authorize
Speaker 1: a long distance call, then you can get free long
Speaker 1: distance calls. And the box they basically Wosniak finds this
Speaker 1: guide to how the phone company is like shit works,
Speaker 1: and he emulates all of these things. So he makes
Speaker 1: this box that you can use to hack the phone system.
Speaker 1: If you have one of these, you can make the
Speaker 1: phones do whatever you want for free. Right, you can
Speaker 1: get free calls, and that's a big deal because that's
Speaker 1: a major expense at the time. Right Jobs works on
Speaker 1: the project with Wosniak. Wosniak's obviously the big technical mind,
Speaker 1: but it's like a thing that they do together. And
Speaker 1: for the Wosniak, he wants this thing for himself because
Speaker 1: it's a nice gizmo to have and it's a fun
Speaker 1: technical challenge. But that's kind of the extent of his
Speaker 1: interest in making this thing. Steve sees this differently. He's like,
Speaker 1: we can sell this, We can make some money with
Speaker 1: this invention of yours, and so he convinces Wosniak to
Speaker 1: mass produce and sell his blue box. This is a
Speaker 1: serious crime, right, you are hacking the phone system here.
Speaker 1: This is so fucking illegal what they're doing. What Steve
Speaker 1: is saying is basically it is not any different from
Speaker 1: in a legal sense, from saying we should sell Heroin, right,
Speaker 1: like he is saying, we need to get into business
Speaker 1: committing a series of crimes. Right, And the two kind
Speaker 1: of get into this a lot like other kids treat
Speaker 1: selling weed, Right, this is there like selling pot to
Speaker 1: make pocket money. Thing of like when when Steve Jobs
Speaker 1: as in high school and he doesn't know anything about
Speaker 1: marketing yet, but he understands something about like what the
Speaker 1: customer base is, and he knows that the people who
Speaker 1: are going to want this thing most and be able
Speaker 1: to afford it are college kids, right. They have some
Speaker 1: amount of money, some amount of financial independence, and they
Speaker 1: also are frustrated by how expensive it is to make calls.
Speaker 1: They can't make all the calls they want, they can't
Speaker 1: run their social life the way they want because using
Speaker 1: your phone costs money. So if we can sell them
Speaker 1: this device, this is the group that's going to be
Speaker 1: most interested in having it and willing to break the
Speaker 1: law to have it. So they go door to door
Speaker 1: at college campuses, knocking on dorms and offering these very
Speaker 1: illegal products to whoever opens the door. Wozniak relentlessly works
Speaker 1: to improve the device, whilst Jobs kind of smooths out
Speaker 1: the business side of things. One of his innovative crime
Speaker 1: yeah yeah, the crime part he writes out handwritten customer
Speaker 1: service guarantees. He like basically writes a warranty.
Speaker 2: An SLA for yeah for crime.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he has a crime a crime warranty beautiful. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's kind of it's awesome.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I take everything back. He's not a boss that
Speaker 2: he's genius.
Speaker 1: No, No, he is ahead of his time, and it's yeah,
Speaker 1: you could argue maybe a bad idea for an illegal product,
Speaker 1: but it's good business sense, you know, it makes people
Speaker 1: comfortable in the product. And he and Wosniak make about
Speaker 1: six thousand dollars selling these things, which is a lot
Speaker 1: of money at the time, like that's good money. It
Speaker 1: all kind of falls apart when one customer pulls a
Speaker 1: gun on them and steals a device. Jobs is kind
Speaker 1: of like, well, that's all the appetite for risk I have,
Speaker 1: and he decides to quit at that point. Wosniak, maybe
Speaker 1: just because he's a little less wise about danger, continues
Speaker 1: selling these things for a while, and Jobs just takes
Speaker 1: a cut even though he's no longer part of the work.
Speaker 1: What makes Wosniak stop is that, like this elder phone
Speaker 1: freaker who'd helped him work out the blue box gets
Speaker 1: arrested by the Feds, and Wosniak is like, oh shit,
Speaker 1: maybe there are consequences for breaking federal laws. You gould stop. Yeah,
Speaker 1: crime's illegal.
Speaker 2: No, just one more thing. It's a crime, an.
Speaker 1: Insanely great crime. So the summer Steve and other Steve
Speaker 1: sold their blue boxes was the last summer of Jobs's childhood,
Speaker 1: and he was already quite independent. He'd fallen for a
Speaker 1: girl at his high school, Chrisanne Brennan. They had met
Speaker 1: at Homestead High School that same year, and she was
Speaker 1: about a year below him. Their daughter Lisa, described their
Speaker 1: meat cute this way. On Wednesdays through the night, she
Speaker 1: animated a student film in the high school quad with
Speaker 1: a group of friends. One of those nights, my father
Speaker 1: approached her in the spotlight where she stood waiting to
Speaker 1: move the claymation characters, and handed her a page of
Speaker 1: Bob Dylan lyrics he'd typed out sad eyed Lady of
Speaker 1: the Lowlands. I want it back when you're done, he said,
Speaker 1: and that weird anecdote would kind of symbolize the next
Speaker 1: forty years of their relationship, him doing stuff that's like
Speaker 1: almost sweet and then also we weirdly shitty's He's an
Speaker 1: odd man in terms of the way he courts people,
Speaker 1: but he is sweet at the start of things. He
Speaker 1: like flirts with her by showing up because she's this
Speaker 1: thing she's animating is like kind of risque, and the
Speaker 1: school doesn't really want them doing it, so they have
Speaker 1: to kind of do it in secret. And so he'll
Speaker 1: show up to sessions where she's animating these figures and
Speaker 1: he'll hold candles up while she works on them so
Speaker 1: that she can work in the dark, which is legitimately
Speaker 1: pretty romantic. After he graduates, he asks her to move
Speaker 1: in with him in a cabin off in the countryside
Speaker 1: a little bit for the summer, and his parents aren't
Speaker 1: happy that he's like moving with this chick he met
Speaker 1: into a cabin before starting college, but they can't really
Speaker 1: say no to their kids.
Speaker 2: So he should have thought about that before you trained
Speaker 2: him that he can do whatever he wants forever.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Yeah, this one's really on you, guys.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So they have an idyllic summer together, funded by the
Speaker 1: illegal phone freaking boxes that Steve had been selling. Now,
Speaker 1: he had already started smoking pot before they met, but
Speaker 1: she introduced him to LSD and he's later going to
Speaker 1: say this is like maybe the most significant intellectual moment
Speaker 1: of his life. When he takes acid for the first time,
Speaker 1: which you know, I don't feel all that different about
Speaker 1: me taking acid for the first time. A lot of
Speaker 1: people have this experience, and like most kids who have
Speaker 1: a profound experience taking acid in high school, he leaves
Speaker 1: after graduating to go to Read College in Portland, Oregon.
Speaker 1: And Read is that kind of college, right, It is
Speaker 1: the like kind of hippie star child school that's like
Speaker 1: a big part of its reputation. And chris Anne kind
Speaker 1: of breaks up with him before he leaves for school.
Speaker 1: We don't really know entirely why it happens. I think
Speaker 1: it's partly a result that like neither of them are
Speaker 1: good at communicating. So Steve doesn't say, hey, I want
Speaker 1: to make this thing more official, and chris Anne is
Speaker 1: kind of like, well then you know, I'm going to
Speaker 1: go move on with my life, right, And she starts
Speaker 1: dating somebody else, but he's in love with her, and
Speaker 1: so he's kind of devastated, and at least in the
Speaker 1: account that chris Ann gives, he never really forgives her
Speaker 1: for breaking up with him. This is going to be
Speaker 1: relevant because the person he's going to take this out
Speaker 1: on primarily is the child they later have together, but
Speaker 1: that has not happened. Yet Steve goes to read He's
Speaker 1: only in school for like six months, and then he
Speaker 1: decides school is not for me because school is where
Speaker 1: people teach you things, and I don't have anything to
Speaker 1: learn from other people.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: So he doesn't fully drop out, though, because Reid is
Speaker 1: this kind of school where they're like, look, we cater
Speaker 1: to weird people, right, like to folks who are off
Speaker 1: the beaten path intellectually. The administrator there is like, well,
Speaker 1: if you're not in class and paying, you can still
Speaker 1: just show up to school classes that interest you. You know,
Speaker 1: that's fine. They call it auditing classes. I don't think
Speaker 1: he's really auditing them, but he does kind of just
Speaker 1: bum around campus for like a year, And the most
Speaker 1: influential part of this is he winds up taking a
Speaker 1: calligraphy class, and he will later claim this is why
Speaker 1: when the Mac comes out, it allows multiple type phases,
Speaker 1: and it's like the I think the first personal computer
Speaker 1: where you can pick your font basically, and he would
Speaker 1: later tell Isaacson, since Windows just copied the Mac, it's
Speaker 1: likely that no personal computer would have them if he
Speaker 1: hadn't put them in the Mac. And it's arguable that
Speaker 1: that's true. He definitely like cares more about that shit
Speaker 1: than most of the people.
Speaker 2: But you're telling me, no, one would think, well, if
Speaker 2: the rights look different in history, I think.
Speaker 1: We would have eventually stumbled on to fonts. Steve he
Speaker 1: didn't invent design, No, but he doesn't have an impact
Speaker 1: on like why it's a priority for the.
Speaker 2: Max, Right, and I can buy that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he makes some friends at READ, including some folks
Speaker 1: who'd become early Apple employees, like Elizabeth Holmes, the girl
Speaker 1: friend of his first of his best friend in college.
Speaker 1: Is what I was saying when like, there's a weird
Speaker 1: number of people who whose names are later famous because
Speaker 1: of somebody else.
Speaker 2: Elizabeth Holmes. I thought she was much younger than Yeah.
Speaker 1: This Elizabeth Holmes is a major part of the Steve
Speaker 1: Jobs story, which is funny because the criminal Elizabeth Holmes
Speaker 1: patterns her entire image off of Steve Jobs, right, huh, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a weird little quinky dink. Here's how Isaacson describes
Speaker 1: Elizabeth Holmes this one meeting Steve Jobs. He insulted her
Speaker 1: at their first meeting by grilling her about how much
Speaker 1: money it would take to get her to have sex
Speaker 1: with another man.
Speaker 2: What a charming fellow, Steve jobs this, Wait, what an
Speaker 2: insane conversation to have with anyone that's fucking nutsy? Hey,
Speaker 2: what's up anyway?
Speaker 1: Yeah, we get you to fuck that guy?
Speaker 2: Yeah, not me, just another guy.
Speaker 1: And it's he's also in this being shitty to her
Speaker 1: boyfriend because in front of him too, he's like, I
Speaker 1: wonder how much it would cost to get you to
Speaker 1: fuck someone else? Right, But her boyfriend is a guy
Speaker 1: named Daniel Kottkey, and Dan is a Buddhist, right, and
Speaker 1: he's a very mellow person. He is kind. He's one
Speaker 1: of the big early influences on Steve's growing interest in
Speaker 1: Eastern spirituality, right, and he and Dan become best friends
Speaker 1: for a while. Steve's biggest influence is a book that
Speaker 1: they both love called be Here Now, which is a
Speaker 1: guide to meditation and psychedelic drugs. Steve becomes particularly enthralled
Speaker 1: with Zen Buddhism, and particularly the importance that it places
Speaker 1: on intuition, which Steve has begun to believe matters more
Speaker 1: than formal knowledge, because again, he's never going to be
Speaker 1: a guy who was an impressive formal knowledge credential. And
Speaker 1: if you're that kind of guy. It kind of behooves
Speaker 1: you to think that what matters most is this kind
Speaker 1: of ineffable and unprovable sense that my intuition is better
Speaker 1: than other people's.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't need to be small, I need to
Speaker 2: be right, I think is how he feels.
Speaker 1: Yes very much. And you know who else doesn't need
Speaker 1: to be smart but is always right. Sponsors of this podcast,
Speaker 1: We're Back soh College is also aware in addition to
Speaker 1: kind of getting into zen Buddhism, it's where Steve's dietary
Speaker 1: preferences take a spin off the beaten path that will
Speaker 1: ultimately cause his death. Steve had always been a picky
Speaker 1: eater as a kid, and he'd always kind of preferred
Speaker 1: fruit and vegetables to anything else. He has this kind
Speaker 1: of natural aversion to I think, particularly like red meats
Speaker 1: and also poultry, it seems like. But in his freshman
Speaker 1: year he reads a book called Diet for a Small Planet.
Speaker 1: At the time, it's a fairly groundbreaking bestseller, advocating for
Speaker 1: soy above meat as a protein source and condemning the
Speaker 1: meat industry for its environmental impact. All of that is
Speaker 1: very good and perfectly fair, right, None of that's wrong. Steve, though,
Speaker 1: has this tendency to take things too far right. While
Speaker 1: diet for a small planet, it spends a lot of
Speaker 1: time discussing necessary combinations of food to ensure optimal health.
Speaker 1: If you're going to cut meat out of your diet,
Speaker 1: there are things you need to make sure to do
Speaker 1: so you don't have vitamin deficiencies, right. I think the
Speaker 1: most obvious would be, like an iron deficiency. It's easier
Speaker 1: to get enough iron if you're eating red meat. You
Speaker 1: don't have to eat red meat to have optimal health.
Speaker 1: It's healthier not to, but you do need to. You
Speaker 1: do need to take some care in the combinations of
Speaker 1: food you have to ensure that you get like enough
Speaker 1: iron right. Jobs doesn't really take that part of the
Speaker 1: book to heart, and he instead begins embarking on some
Speaker 1: extreme and experimental diets. For example, sometimes he'll go weeks
Speaker 1: eating nothing but fruit.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: At one point, he lives entirely off of carrots and almonds.
Speaker 1: Friends claim that during these periods of eating basically nothing
Speaker 1: but carrots, he has this orange hue to his skin
Speaker 1: because of all the fucking carrots he's eating. This is
Speaker 1: not good health, right, This is a level of extremity
Speaker 1: that is maladaptive. Right, this is an eating disorder. I
Speaker 1: think you could you could fairly characterize this. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: this bias towards the extreme leads him away from this
Speaker 1: first book, which is a pretty reasonable book. I don't
Speaker 1: think I've never heard any arguments that it's like wildly
Speaker 1: wrong about anything. I think it's got some good information
Speaker 1: in it him to a book that's significantly less well grounded,
Speaker 1: which is called Mucusless Diet Healing System. Now you can
Speaker 1: tell from the title that there's going to be some
Speaker 1: nonsense in that book, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that sounds like something you would get advertised to
Speaker 2: you on Twitter nowadays.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, it sounds like the kind of thing Elon
Speaker 1: Musk would buy into and cause himself permanent, like lymphatic
Speaker 1: damage or something. It was written in the early nineteen
Speaker 1: hundreds by a German naturapath named Arnold Ritt. Arnold believed
Speaker 1: that white blood cells were not part of the immune system,
Speaker 1: but a byproduct of mucus producing foods that poison the
Speaker 1: blood Erit introduced the concept of an all fruit diet
Speaker 1: combined with regular fasting in order to rid the body
Speaker 1: of dangerous mucus. In nineteen sixty three, a congressional report
Speaker 1: described him as a cult leader whose followers quote believed
Speaker 1: that women who adhered to the diet program of professional
Speaker 1: professor Arnold Ritt could expect immaculate conception. In other words,
Speaker 1: if if you follow the diet, you will have a
Speaker 1: child without having sex. Right, your body will spontaneously produce
Speaker 1: something that might be a problem of some of the followers.
Speaker 1: So yes, yeah, seems like maybe he was covering up
Speaker 1: for something else. Eric's followers also believe that all mental
Speaker 1: illness was caused by mucus decaying and causing gas pressure
Speaker 1: to build up in the brain. Look, folks, I'm not
Speaker 1: a psychiatrist, but I feel confident saying that's not what
Speaker 1: causes mental illness. That is mental illness.
Speaker 2: I'm gonna I'm gonna have to side with you on
Speaker 2: that one. That doesn't sound right to No.
Speaker 1: I've never because the tech Press Corps is not always
Speaker 1: doing all the work they ought to do, I haven't
Speaker 1: ever run into anyone asking Steve Jobs, do you think
Speaker 1: all mental illness is caused by decaying brain mucus brought
Speaker 1: on by milk drinking.
Speaker 2: But I wish they will.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, why didn't you ask this moss bird?
Speaker 2: Oh uh yeah, did you do that? No? Yeah, believe
Speaker 2: this about woman. I don't think he lost them a
Speaker 2: challenging question.
Speaker 1: Okay, no, it's very funny. So physicians have noted that
Speaker 1: the fruitarian diet that Jobs embraces does not contain sufficient protein,
Speaker 1: and that his fasting schedules could be extremely dangerous. Steve
Speaker 1: Jobs based large portions of his life on this man's teachings,
Speaker 1: and because he was now eating nearly only fruit, he
Speaker 1: stops bathing. And his belief is that body odor only
Speaker 1: happens if you eat nasty, mucus causing foods, So if
Speaker 1: he's not eating those foods, he has no need to bathe.
Speaker 1: Now everyone around him is tell it, spends twenty years
Speaker 1: telling him, Steve, you smell like fucking dead ass, Like
Speaker 1: take a full crazy that, Yeah, but he is.
Speaker 2: He is.
Speaker 1: It's this thing because this is a religious belief of his.
Speaker 1: He's like, no, I can't smell bad, right because I'm
Speaker 1: not eating the foods that make you smell bad, So
Speaker 1: I will never bathe. Like it's such a weird asshole
Speaker 1: thing to do the way that he insists on this.
Speaker 1: But this is like Steve Jobs will be the smelly
Speaker 1: guy for the next twenty years of his life, right.
Speaker 2: That's insane. Twenty years so well into his career. Apple.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, they are constantly telling him, Steve, you have
Speaker 1: to bathe before we have this meeting with this guy
Speaker 1: who's going to invest millions of dollars in the company,
Speaker 1: Like these are serious financial people, Like you can't you
Speaker 1: smell like my religion?
Speaker 2: I smell this way?
Speaker 1: Because no, it's more like I don't smell this way,
Speaker 1: despite what all of you seem to think.
Speaker 2: Jesus Christ, it's such.
Speaker 1: A weird, unhinged thing to insist on. One of his
Speaker 1: closest friends while he's living in Oregon is Robert Friedland.
Speaker 1: Now today Friedland is a billionaire mine owner, or at
Speaker 1: least he was. I don't know, maybe he's dead now,
Speaker 1: but he becomes a billionaire mine owner. Right. But Friedland
Speaker 1: at this point is a rich hippie kid, right, He's
Speaker 1: into all this Eastern spirituality that Jobs is, and he's
Speaker 1: got this like Land that's that he has access to
Speaker 1: because he's a rich kid. Right. And Friedland meets Steve
Speaker 1: Jobs when Steve is trying to sell him a typewriter,
Speaker 1: and he walks in on Friedland having sex with his girlfriend. Right,
Speaker 1: So he like comes into Friedland's house because he's invited
Speaker 1: there to sell him this typewriter and Friedland's having sex
Speaker 1: and Jobs is like, oh shit, I'll come back later,
Speaker 1: and Friedland is like, no, wait, sit here, they'll be finish,
Speaker 1: and like makes Steve wait while he's having sex, and
Speaker 1: Steve is impressed by this. He's like, wow, that's a
Speaker 1: power move, right, and that guy has sex. As a
Speaker 1: weird aside, Jobs is going to do this to people
Speaker 1: when he is an adult, and the people he's going
Speaker 1: to do this with is much much more fucked up
Speaker 1: than what Friedland is doing here. But this becomes a
Speaker 1: weird part of Jobs's personality because Jobs is obsessed with
Speaker 1: Friedland for a while. Isaacson describes Friedland as almost being
Speaker 1: jobs as guru. Right, this is someone he patterns himself
Speaker 1: off of. So Friedland gets this farm outside of Portland
Speaker 1: and he turns it into a commune that kind of
Speaker 1: it's kind of a lower case C cult, right. People
Speaker 1: tended to listen to Friedland and do what he said,
Speaker 1: and he has this gift for selling people on even
Speaker 1: pretty outlandish ideas. Jobs's friend Dan Kottkey later claims Friedland
Speaker 1: taught Steve the reality distortion field. He was charismatic and
Speaker 1: a bit of a con man and could bin situations
Speaker 1: to his very strong will. He was mercurial, sure of himself,
Speaker 1: a little dictatorial. Steve admired that, and he became more
Speaker 1: like that after spending time with Robert. Now Friedland introduced
Speaker 1: Jobs to the local Hari Krishna's and they put him
Speaker 1: to work helping out on the farm, which gradually morphed
Speaker 1: from a communal living experiment into more of a business.
Speaker 1: People start to leave at this point because Friedland becomes
Speaker 1: more of a tyrant, and Friedland eventually drops the hippie
Speaker 1: shit to acquire a series of gold and copper minds
Speaker 1: and become very wealthy. In an interview with Isaac, Jobs
Speaker 1: described as old friend and unwittingly himself, Robert always portrayed
Speaker 1: himself as a spiritual person, but he crossed the line
Speaker 1: from being charismatic to being a con man. It was
Speaker 1: a strange thing to have one of the spiritual people
Speaker 1: in your young life turn out to be symbolically and
Speaker 1: in reality a gold miner. And what's funny about that
Speaker 1: is like that is Jobs too. All of this shit
Speaker 1: about being into Eastern mysticism and spirituality is an esthetic
Speaker 1: choice he makes. It is not a deeply held belief.
Speaker 1: That's my contention, right, and we'll build to that as
Speaker 1: we go on. But it's kind of noteworthy that he
Speaker 1: takes a lot of this from Robert Friedland, who is
Speaker 1: the same kind of guy. He enjoys the aesthetic of
Speaker 1: being enlightened of this kind of like Eastern non material spirituality,
Speaker 1: rejecting the crude pursuit of wealth while pursuing wealth, you know,
Speaker 1: and power.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's all about the finessing the customer into believing
Speaker 2: they're participating in culture.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, and Steve is going to be that kind
Speaker 1: of guy in the same way that Friedland is. So
Speaker 1: Jobs returns to California after he gives up fully on college,
Speaker 1: and he talks his way again and the way that
Speaker 1: he's good at into a job working for Atari, and
Speaker 1: the way the company founder describes it, Jobs comes in
Speaker 1: one day and is basically like, I'm not leaving until
Speaker 1: you give me a job. And in the seventies that
Speaker 1: kind of thing worked. Steve got back together with Chris
Speaker 1: Ann in this period, and you know, they are doing
Speaker 1: well for a while. They're kind of got to have
Speaker 1: this on again, off again sort of thing for a
Speaker 1: period of several years. He goes to India for an
Speaker 1: extended period of time, you know, kind of in the
Speaker 1: middle of this, he takes a leave of absence basically
Speaker 1: from Atari and he goes to India to like find himself.
Speaker 1: He's hoping to meet this guru he's a fan of
Speaker 1: named Maharajji, and this guy had been influential to several
Speaker 1: of his friends. Kotky's a fan too, and he's traveling
Speaker 1: there with Katki. But the guru dies right before Jobs
Speaker 1: shows up, like a day or two before he arrives
Speaker 1: at this guy's like place. He passes, So instead Jobs
Speaker 1: attends the kum Mela. And the Mela is I've been
Speaker 1: to the Mela. It's this event. I think it's every
Speaker 1: four years in one of this rotating set of cities
Speaker 1: in India, and every twelve years they do a mela
Speaker 1: in a Lahabad, which is like the holiest of the melas.
Speaker 1: And every time they do this thing, every time they
Speaker 1: do a kum Mela, it's the largest gathering of human
Speaker 1: beings for any purpose in the history of the human race.
Speaker 1: When Jobs is there, it's like ten million people.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: The Mela that I attended, and I think twenty thirteen
Speaker 1: was like one hundred and ten million people. There were
Speaker 1: about and this is over the course of a month,
Speaker 1: but there were like forty million people in tents when
Speaker 1: it was like three New York cities where the people
Speaker 1: intents when I was there. This is an intense event
Speaker 1: to go to, right, And it's one of those things
Speaker 1: that like you can't you can't not be affected by it,
Speaker 1: just sheerly because of the sheer mass of huge scale. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's there's nothing else that's ever been like it in
Speaker 1: the whole history of our species. Right, It's this totally
Speaker 1: unique event, and it has an impact on Jobs. He
Speaker 1: gets his head shaven, you know. While he's there, he
Speaker 1: reads this book called Autobiography of a Yogi, which he's
Speaker 1: going to reread every year of his life. It's like
Speaker 1: the only book on his iPad. And one friend claimed
Speaker 1: that he even considers becoming a Sadhu. And sad whos
Speaker 1: are these kind of wandering, itinerant Hindu monks. They're these
Speaker 1: very intense, like wandering religious wildmen in a certain way.
Speaker 1: They're kind of constantly smoking marijuana. It's a big thing,
Speaker 1: like the sod who's get this kind of exemption to
Speaker 1: the Indian laws for that, and you know, a lot
Speaker 1: of them show up at the MELA and Jobs claims
Speaker 1: that he like or claims through a friend basically that
Speaker 1: he was considering adopting this life for himself. I don't
Speaker 1: think that's ever a serious thing things about. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that is very see.
Speaker 3: That.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, there's a version of the future that's maybe
Speaker 1: better where he does this. Jobs would later claim his
Speaker 1: time in India convinced him of the premium importance of intuition,
Speaker 1: and he claims this in a very racist fashion. Here's
Speaker 1: what he writes to Isaacson. The people in the Indian
Speaker 1: countryside don't use their intellect like we do. First mistake,
Speaker 1: everybody uses their intellect for the same things, which is
Speaker 1: reasoning things out. But okay, he says, they use their
Speaker 1: intuition instead, and their intuition is far more developed than
Speaker 1: in the rest of the world. Intuition is a very
Speaker 1: powerful thing, more powerful than intellect. In my opinion. That's
Speaker 1: had a big impact on my work, Western rational thought
Speaker 1: is not an innate human characteristic. It is learned and
Speaker 1: it is the great achievement of Western civilization. In the
Speaker 1: villages of India, they never learned it. Yes they did.
Speaker 1: They have science, Steve, they build cities, there's a tech
Speaker 1: industry in India. They didn't never develop intellect, Like, what
Speaker 1: is wrong with you?
Speaker 2: Like, just to be clear, this man is insanely racist
Speaker 2: and wrong, yes, in so many ways, But it is
Speaker 2: kind of interesting how he's running completely parallel to how
Speaker 2: people like Andresen think, who are very much like logic
Speaker 2: is what logic is, what's most important. Logic is the
Speaker 2: thing Elon Musk's same deal all of these like rationalist freaks.
Speaker 2: I think Steve Jobs is horrifying. It's just interesting seeing
Speaker 2: that kind of juxtaposition.
Speaker 1: And it is he's wrong about like India, right, because
Speaker 1: India is completely you know, if you've read anything of
Speaker 1: Indian history, has a lot of history states right, like, yes,
Speaker 1: it's a large organized country and it has been a
Speaker 1: large organized region of the world for a very long time.
Speaker 1: The idea that like, yeah, they only have intuition over
Speaker 1: there is racist and nonsense. I will say to the
Speaker 1: because one of the things we'll be building towards in
Speaker 1: later episodes is Steve, unlike most of these guys, unlike
Speaker 1: andresen is legit, has a legitimate kind of genius, right,
Speaker 1: Maybe not in the way that he gets credit for,
Speaker 1: but he is really good at certain things, and he's
Speaker 1: good at certain things that these their founders who are
Speaker 1: aping him are not good at. And I think it
Speaker 1: is because they are all obsessed with being rational, and
Speaker 1: he is more obsessed with stuff that he's never even
Speaker 1: going to try to justify as rational. When Jobs is
Speaker 1: repeatedly turning back early iterations of the iPhone and saying,
Speaker 1: this isn't ready, This isn't ready, it's not because of
Speaker 1: anything he can prove objectively. It's because of this feeling
Speaker 1: that like, no, this is not yet what people want
Speaker 1: to put in their fucking pocket and have with them
Speaker 1: all the time, right. And so there is I think
Speaker 1: an extent to which you do have to understand. The
Speaker 1: kind of intuition that he has is crucial in his success.
Speaker 1: It's nuts what he thinks about intuition and regards to India.
Speaker 1: But like the fact that he is so focused on
Speaker 1: intuition is part of why he's good at the things
Speaker 1: he's good at, right, I think that is kind of
Speaker 1: important to understand. Now, the contrast between the cold hearted
Speaker 1: corporate maven and the hippie kid baffles a lot of
Speaker 1: people in jobs's orbit. One former Apple executive related this
Speaker 1: to Brn Schlnder. There was always the spiritual side which
Speaker 1: didn't seem to fit with anything else he was doing.
Speaker 1: And one thing that becomes clear when you study the
Speaker 1: man is that the Buddhism and the hippie philosophizing, these
Speaker 1: are all aesthetics to jobs. He likes the way they
Speaker 1: feel and look, and the way that wrapping himself and
Speaker 1: then makes him feel. But at his center, he is
Speaker 1: still driven by a terrible and very mundane ambition, and
Speaker 1: so he leaves India. He does not become Asadu. He
Speaker 1: gets his job back at Atari when he returns, and
Speaker 1: he rekindles his friendship with Wozniak, who had started working
Speaker 1: for HP at the time. Now, while this is going on,
Speaker 1: computers are still things that corporations purchase to handle specific,
Speaker 1: limited tasks. There is a computer hobbyist scene that is
Speaker 1: starting to build, but it's small, and to be in
Speaker 1: it you can't just buy a computer and be a
Speaker 1: guy who's into computers. You're gonna have to build it, right,
Speaker 1: You're going to have to solder. We're not even talking
Speaker 1: building it the way you build one now, where you
Speaker 1: buy a box and you buy pieces and you slot
Speaker 1: them and connect them. You are like soldering chips together. Right,
Speaker 1: That's the only way to have a machine that functions.
Speaker 1: In this period of time, personal computers are not a
Speaker 1: thing yet. It's not a concept really in most people's heads.
Speaker 1: In the book Becoming Steve Jobs, Schlnder notes that there
Speaker 1: was only one word processor on the market that a
Speaker 1: regular person might be able to afford. Jobs had a
Speaker 1: keen enough sense of the future that he knew this
Speaker 1: was going to change. He wanted to drive that change,
Speaker 1: but first he needed startup capital. Steve's boss at Atari
Speaker 1: had asked him to create a prototype for a new
Speaker 1: version of Pong, and it offered a sizeable bonus if
Speaker 1: he could reduce the number of chips required. This task
Speaker 1: was well beyond Steve, but not beyond Wosniak, who easily
Speaker 1: completed the job. The two were paid seven hundred dollars,
Speaker 1: which they split evenly. Then Jobs was given a bonus
Speaker 1: either five thousand or seven thousand dollars for completing it,
Speaker 1: you know the way that Wosniak completed it. So they
Speaker 1: get this massive bonus because Wosniak is able to hit
Speaker 1: these kind He's able to reduce the chips by a
Speaker 1: certain amount. Right, Steve doesn't hell Wosniac that they've been
Speaker 1: given a bonus. He splits the seven hundred with him,
Speaker 1: and he pockets five thousand or seven thousand dollars and
Speaker 1: lies about it to the guy who's supposed to be
Speaker 1: his best friend. Steve is at Wosniak does not find
Speaker 1: out about this betrayal for more than a decade, right,
Speaker 1: And in twenty eleven, he gives an interview about this
Speaker 1: on a BBC podcast, which The ib Time summarizes this way.
Speaker 1: When asked if he was bitter about the deal, Wozniak
Speaker 1: said no, but confessed I cried. I cried quite a
Speaker 1: bit when I read that in a book. And yeah,
Speaker 1: it's really sad.
Speaker 2: It's really sad. That means he actually like can't.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he was, he loved Jobs like this, This is
Speaker 1: finding best friend Steve.
Speaker 2: Jobs cried, Yes, this was relevant, mm hmm.
Speaker 1: A reason of finding out you've been betrayed like this. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a reason for some tears. And it's fucked up
Speaker 1: about this. At the very end of his life, Isaacson
Speaker 1: is going to press Jobs on this, and Jobs never
Speaker 1: admits to having robbed Wosniak. He's like, he misremembered it, right,
Speaker 1: Steve Wozniak has a plane crash after Apple's IPO, right,
Speaker 1: and it does some brain damage to him. Wosniak suffers
Speaker 1: some damage as a result of this, and Jobs basically
Speaker 1: kind of tries to gaslight him and is like, he's
Speaker 1: misremembering it, right, you know, Christ he doesn't remember it properly,
Speaker 1: Andosniak is like, no, I remember what I got and like,
Speaker 1: And they've talked to biographers, have talked to the people
Speaker 1: at Atari who are like, no, yeah, we paid Jobs
Speaker 1: all this money. And if Wosniak says he didn't get it,
Speaker 1: he probably didn't get it right. So that's Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: probably the first real fucked up thing Jobs has done.
Speaker 1: And there's a lot more to other than the bombs
Speaker 1: at his school, other than the bombs at his school, right,
Speaker 1: other than bombing his teacher. Yeah, but we'll be getting
Speaker 1: in all of that and more in part due But first,
Speaker 1: do you have a podcast ed where people can listen
Speaker 1: to your?
Speaker 2: Do? I do? I have a podcast called Better Offline,
Speaker 2: a weekly tech show analyzing people like Steve Jobs, but
Speaker 2: the ones who are alive and doing stuff today. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and yeah, you can find a Better Offline dot com.
Speaker 2: You find it on iHeartRadio or wherever you get in
Speaker 2: your podcasts.
Speaker 1: Hell, yeah you can, and you can find us on
Speaker 1: Thursday or we'll be continuing the Steve Jobs story. Goodbye, Goodbye.
Speaker 3: Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 3: For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
Speaker 3: Zonemedia dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 3: Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast