Speaker 1: Also media, Hello Hello.
Speaker 2: That was not a U two reference. I don't. I
Speaker 2: don't like that band enough to make it make a reference.
Speaker 2: I don't dislike them enough to really shit talk them either.
Speaker 2: Too many people have done that, so I'll just say bono. Uh,
Speaker 2: I don't know, Sophie, how do you feel about the
Speaker 2: title I've got on this on this on this episode
Speaker 2: for us? Should I read it out to the audience?
Speaker 2: Should they know?
Speaker 1: I mean? I could go with or without?
Speaker 3: Okay?
Speaker 2: Well? She Sophie has like chat on all of the titles.
Speaker 2: The original title for this series was Steve Jobs, the
Speaker 2: Hitler of Computers, Sophie said was not appropriate.
Speaker 1: It's not that I said it was appropriate. I said
Speaker 1: it could very much be taken out of context, which
Speaker 1: could be damaging to not.
Speaker 3: So, I would like my name not to associated with
Speaker 3: the word hell yeah, to.
Speaker 4: Be to be to be safe for you know, just you,
Speaker 4: but also all the lovely people that we are able
Speaker 4: to employ.
Speaker 2: I've made peace that my name will always be tied
Speaker 2: to Hitler. Sophie. You know, I'm like Germany in that regard,
Speaker 2: but for a very different reason, mainly podcasts. For me Germany,
Speaker 2: it was some other things but I think my other
Speaker 2: title is problematic free, right.
Speaker 1: I mean it was just kind.
Speaker 2: Of Steve Jobs for Electric Google lore. That's not bad.
Speaker 1: That was not the title I vetoed. I vevoed Sieve
Speaker 1: Job sucks or something dumb.
Speaker 3: That was, well, that's the human experience with that one.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, like you can do better than that.
Speaker 5: It was one thirty pm. I've just gotten up, you know,
Speaker 5: I haven't had coffee yet the k noon. So we're
Speaker 5: going to talk for a little bit before we get
Speaker 5: into the last great act of Steve Jobs, the stuff
Speaker 5: that everyone actually knows him from, right, Like, obviously people
Speaker 5: in the eighties and nineties knew him as the Apple guy.
Speaker 5: But when people talk about him now, very few of
Speaker 5: them are thinking of like the Apple too, or even
Speaker 5: if like the original Macintosh. They think about the iPod,
Speaker 5: the iPhone, the iPad, the app store, like everything Apple
Speaker 5: is today. Right, So first I want to I want
Speaker 5: to get into before we talk about how he got
Speaker 5: to all that shit. I want to talk about part
Speaker 5: of why Apple fell to pieces after he left. We've
Speaker 5: talked a lot about his mistakes, his misjudgments, and it's
Speaker 5: important to note he was not very good at guiding Apple,
Speaker 5: no one else was either, So in early nineteen ninety one,
Speaker 5: not long after Steve left, the idea of a handheld
Speaker 5: personal digital assistant was pitched to CEO John Scully on
Speaker 5: an airplane. He's on some private flight and some guy's like, hey,
Speaker 5: you see these like palm pilot things people are starting
Speaker 5: to carry. What if we've made an Apple one?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 2: I don't even think palm pilots are this Sorry it's
Speaker 2: ninety one. Yeah. So he's like, you know these things
Speaker 2: that are kind of evolutions of the beeper that people
Speaker 2: have started to carry, that can keep a calendar, maybe
Speaker 2: you can take some notes on it, but they're pretty primitive.
Speaker 2: Someone tells them like, hey, this could be you know
Speaker 2: what saves Apple jobs. Had been out of the company
Speaker 2: for like five years at that point, and I think
Speaker 2: it's one of those things. If this had been introduced
Speaker 2: when he'd still been there, I think he would have
Speaker 2: fought like hell against it because it was a bad
Speaker 2: idea and it was obviously not where computing was going right.
Speaker 2: People don't want like a personal digital assistant is It
Speaker 2: may seem like a smartphone, but the vision is kind
Speaker 2: of fundamentally limited. These are not connected devices, right, These
Speaker 2: are basically fancy calendars that people carry with them, And
Speaker 2: so it's really different from the kind of idea. It
Speaker 2: seem as like an executive assistant effectively, more than it
Speaker 2: is like something that one hundred million people are going
Speaker 2: to keep in their pockets at all times. Because it
Speaker 2: is kind of a tablet computer, there's a tendency for
Speaker 2: some people to see it as being ahead of its time.
Speaker 2: I don't really know how much I agree with that,
Speaker 2: because it's dogshit. It does not work for fuck right.
Speaker 2: As envisioned. The Newton would have let people take notes, right, Like,
Speaker 2: you're supposed to be able to write with your handwriting,
Speaker 2: and it was going to train translated.
Speaker 3: And all of these devices for like ten years, all
Speaker 3: of them promised this, and yeah.
Speaker 2: They could not do it. It was like, by modern standards,
Speaker 2: dog shit right.
Speaker 3: A while too. It took him like twenty years.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it takes them a bit. They improve the Newtons.
Speaker 2: Some people will say they made it pretty good, but like,
Speaker 2: I don't know that it was ever good enough that
Speaker 2: people would want to use. And when the Newton came out,
Speaker 2: the fact that the handwriting feature is borked on it
Speaker 2: is like such a news story that Gary Trudeau of
Speaker 2: Doonesbury spends a full week making fun of it. He
Speaker 2: hadn't even like used in Newton, but he'd read bad
Speaker 2: reviews and he was just like the guy, yeah, Dunesbury
Speaker 2: Manah yeah, if you want to fight the Doonesbury guy
Speaker 2: in nineteen ninety one, you'd best come correct. That was
Speaker 2: his that was his apex Jesus. So part of the
Speaker 2: failure came down to the fact that Scully was obsessed
Speaker 2: with the idea that this device should fit easily in
Speaker 2: his pocket, and they were like behind the scen people
Speaker 2: are joking about, like should we just buy himp shirts
Speaker 2: with bigger pockets? Like he's doing the same thing. He
Speaker 2: took too much from jobs where he's like, I'm just
Speaker 2: going to lay down the aesthetics but not really care
Speaker 2: about how possible or impossible that is. But that's not
Speaker 2: really why this fails. It's just that PDAs are not
Speaker 2: something people wanted, right. They wanted a connected device, and
Speaker 2: that's key to what a smartphone was. But like a
Speaker 2: Palm pilot type deal you're playing your music on it.
Speaker 2: That might have gotten it to sell. They were kind
Speaker 2: of big. They were just like there were toys for
Speaker 2: rich businessmen to impress less rich businessmen with. Right, that
Speaker 2: was the primary use category. So you can understand how
Speaker 2: a guy like John Scully could get sold on the idea.
Speaker 2: But it was a very bad way.
Speaker 3: We don't do real work, yes, yes, was yeah, like
Speaker 3: these people had assistance as well, So the actual point
Speaker 3: of this thing was well.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was to boys.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Jabs himself took joy in insulting the Newton in public
Speaker 2: and his new rifle. John Scully his old friend, and
Speaker 2: Apple bought Next in nineteen ninety six, and he returned
Speaker 2: to the company in nineteen ninety seven. He expressed particular
Speaker 2: distaste for the stylus. Isaacson writes, God gave us ten styluses.
Speaker 2: He would say, waving his fingers, let's not invent another.
Speaker 2: And that is like, this is you know, he's being
Speaker 2: a dick about it, but he's got a legitimate insight. There.
Speaker 2: There's a lot of debates.
Speaker 3: The biggest wanka way of saying he.
Speaker 2: Did he did. He's to to his new the people
Speaker 2: who work at the company, right, that is kind of
Speaker 2: you might want to be a little more artful than that.
Speaker 2: But styluses were bad ideas, right, we can all agree
Speaker 2: on that he is right. We want like, in order
Speaker 2: for this to be a universal device, it has to
Speaker 2: be something that you just fucking touch. So Scully would
Speaker 2: later argue that the Newton helped save Apple, and this
Speaker 2: is kind of true, but like not in a way
Speaker 2: that matters for him. Basically, to build the Newton, Apple
Speaker 2: had to help fund the design of the ARM processor,
Speaker 2: and Apple was eventually able to sell their interest in
Speaker 2: ARM for like a billion dollars, right, so that's kind
Speaker 2: of what saves Apple, which is like, not really the
Speaker 2: Newton saving Apple, You got lucky. This is like fucking
Speaker 2: Sam Bankman Freed investing in Anthropic and making a bunch
Speaker 2: of money after losing his shirt on everything else. It's like, yeah,
Speaker 2: technically everyone might get made a whole, but you didn't
Speaker 2: know that was gonna happen.
Speaker 3: Bro, That is kind of funny that everything good that
Speaker 3: Apple managed to do seemed to be by accident, or
Speaker 3: at least Steve Jobs.
Speaker 2: Yeah up to I mean, I mean this one that's
Speaker 2: a John Scully win. I'll give that one to him.
Speaker 2: But like this is an example of the being similar
Speaker 2: to Steve Jobs yeah, yeah, I mean he hates Scully
Speaker 2: after this point, at least for a very long time.
Speaker 2: Maybe he made peace with him at the end there.
Speaker 2: I don't know, no, But in general, the instincts that
Speaker 2: Jobs had had up to this point in his life
Speaker 2: towards simplicity, restricting user control, curating the ecosystem, these are
Speaker 2: all the impulses that in the twenty first century would
Speaker 2: lead Apple to staggering success. The iPod, the Mac G three,
Speaker 2: which I actually think comes out in ninety nine, and
Speaker 2: the iPhone all received criticism and still do because of
Speaker 2: how lockdown they are. Right when the when the iMac
Speaker 2: comes out, you can see inside the guts of this thing,
Speaker 2: but you're not meant to fiddle with it like you
Speaker 2: do with a PC.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: It's not like my dad opening up our box and
Speaker 2: throwing in some extra ram. You're not really going to
Speaker 2: be doing that with an iMac. Right, Yeah, unless you
Speaker 2: really know your shit, I guess, and Apple. Apple's gonna
Speaker 2: make it as hard as possible to like do that
Speaker 2: even if you do know your shit. When Jobs first
Speaker 2: returns to the company, he holds a meeting with the
Speaker 2: top designers and executives, and he tells them the problem
Speaker 2: with Apple today is that none of our products have
Speaker 2: any sex. His solution, bafflingly is the iMac, which, sorry,
Speaker 2: it comes out in ninety eight, and I guess people
Speaker 2: do think it's sexy. I think it's more than it's cute,
Speaker 2: that it's something like your grandma.
Speaker 3: You get fucking iMac.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you'd fuck you could fuck I fucking iMac. That's
Speaker 2: the Apple campaign we never saw.
Speaker 3: It's just like a bunch of.
Speaker 2: Dudes looking at an Imax being like, yeah, fucking iMac. Good.
Speaker 1: You're not gonna the fucking dune popcorn bucket ear Robert.
Speaker 2: No, but I I mean, look, Sophie, it now capable
Speaker 2: of more than one love in our life, you know.
Speaker 2: Oh okay, So the Mac was one of the most
Speaker 2: limited personal computers on the market, but it was friendly
Speaker 2: and eight hundred thousand sold in the first five months.
Speaker 2: This is so, this is like, this does even like
Speaker 2: about as well as you'd actually hope the original Mac
Speaker 2: would do. Right, and Apple turns its first profit since
Speaker 2: nineteen ninety five. Now, one of the first things Jobs
Speaker 2: does when he gets back is he reaches back out
Speaker 2: to Lee Klow and like the team at chaiat Day
Speaker 2: who'd done that nineteen eighty four campaign, and Jobs is like, hey,
Speaker 2: please come back and make a special pitch to the
Speaker 2: Apple board, going against like your usual practices, right because
Speaker 2: like Klow's a big enough Naneity is like, I don't
Speaker 2: pitch to companies. If they want me, they come to me, right.
Speaker 2: But Klow agrees for Jobs to do this, and Jobs
Speaker 2: cries like remembering this moment years later to Walter Isaacson,
Speaker 2: which is such an odd moment to get choked up over,
Speaker 2: given you know his daughter loved my brand. Yeah, this
Speaker 2: chokes me up. This really chokes me up. It was
Speaker 2: so clear that Lee loved Apple so much. Here was
Speaker 2: the best guy at advertising, and he hadn't pitched in
Speaker 2: ten years. Yet here he was, and he was pitching
Speaker 2: his heart out because he loved Apple as much as
Speaker 2: we did. He and his team had come up with
Speaker 2: this brilliant idea, think Different, and it was ten times
Speaker 2: better than anything the other agency showed. It choked me
Speaker 2: up and it still makes me cry to think about it,
Speaker 2: both the fact that Lee cared so much and how
Speaker 2: brilliant his think Different idea was. Every once in a while,
Speaker 2: this is where it gets really funny. Every once in
Speaker 2: a while, I find myself in the presence of purity,
Speaker 2: purity of spirit and love, and I always cry. It
Speaker 2: just reaches in and grabs me. That was one of
Speaker 2: those moments. There was a purity about it that I
Speaker 2: will never forget. I cried in my office as he
Speaker 2: was showing me the idea, and I still cry when
Speaker 2: I think about it again. This man, his daughter wasn't
Speaker 2: his daughter for years. But it's like I weep at
Speaker 2: the beauty of Lee Klaus.
Speaker 3: That loved much. I love brands.
Speaker 2: I feel nothing in the face of my own blood.
Speaker 2: But like Campaign, my god, yeah, a fucking idiot, and
Speaker 2: it's it's you know, I remember as a kid, I
Speaker 2: was like a snotty PC gamer right there used to
Speaker 2: be a it's less of a thing. Now there's a
Speaker 2: big PC MAC divide.
Speaker 3: And one of the things I used to work at
Speaker 3: a PC gaming magazine, I know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And one of the things people would bring up
Speaker 2: that was valid is a critique of Max is that, like, well,
Speaker 2: most games don't even work on them right because you
Speaker 2: have to like specifically make it to work on the
Speaker 2: kind of architecture they had, right. This is in part
Speaker 2: because Max are so big now, like most really big
Speaker 2: companies that are making games for a PC are making
Speaker 2: like a mac poort now. But like that was not
Speaker 2: really the case with well, it.
Speaker 3: Was with the Intel processes, but now anyway.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm not anyway. It used to be much more
Speaker 2: of a thing. And I think a lot of people
Speaker 2: I remember at the time seeing this campaign, I was like, well,
Speaker 2: how are you thinking differently if you can't even like
Speaker 2: modify your own machine. But those of us who got
Speaker 2: snotty at the inconsistencies and the message of this campaign
Speaker 2: versus Apple's actual products, we're failing to see something important
Speaker 2: that was not lost on Steve Jobs. The future market
Speaker 2: for these machines. It was not people who like technology right.
Speaker 2: The think different campaign was not based on selling people
Speaker 2: on like, here's the hardware, here's what you can like,
Speaker 2: here's what games this will play, right, here's how well
Speaker 2: you can like do this or that. It was based
Speaker 2: on the feeling of creativity right, and making people think
Speaker 2: of great creative minds from the past and kind of
Speaker 2: see themselves as maybe I could be like that too,
Speaker 2: if I have a creative enough machine. Right, and Jobs,
Speaker 2: this is a legitimate insight. Right, We're not going to
Speaker 2: dwell on processor speed, We're not going to throw much
Speaker 2: of stats out. We're going to relate these stories of
Speaker 2: great artists and geniuses from history, and we're in order
Speaker 2: to embrace a vibe. Right, That's how we're going to
Speaker 2: make our case for the for the iMac is the vibe. Right,
Speaker 2: this is a vibe based computing system, and that makes
Speaker 2: so much fucking money, it's crazy, Like that's a super
Speaker 2: It's a very good way to sell a computer, it
Speaker 2: turns out.
Speaker 3: But also there was a stinky vibe to computing. It
Speaker 3: was still even there was a fringe nature. You either
Speaker 3: used one at work and maybe looked at the inenternet.
Speaker 3: So we're talking like the late nineties right now.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it was still.
Speaker 3: Yeah so you I mean I played EverQuest back then.
Speaker 3: I used PCMIA, card Play Ultimate Online before that. Yeah,
Speaker 3: gaming and PCs in general were very much work. It
Speaker 3: wasn't really there was personal computing, but it wasn't like
Speaker 3: it wasn't to the extent it is now yeah by
Speaker 3: any yesha.
Speaker 2: And the iMac is definitely like a sizable movement in
Speaker 2: that direction, right, And you know some of this is
Speaker 2: that like a lot of the success comes down to
Speaker 2: Jobs understanding both what the market actually does want and
Speaker 2: understanding when someone has a good idea for how to
Speaker 2: market it. Now. Thankfully they didn't go with their entire
Speaker 2: original concept for the Think Different ad. It was initially
Speaker 2: set to the Seal song Crazy because Jobs viewed him
Speaker 2: as one of our greatest living artists. The next version
Speaker 2: included a reading of a Robert Frost poem, The Road
Speaker 2: Not Taken Steve himself. This is the funniest part to me,
Speaker 2: Steve Jobs. The suggestion for the Thing Different at is
Speaker 2: we should have all of the text be cut up
Speaker 2: pieces of speeches from Robin Williams's character in Dead Poet
Speaker 2: Society felt so hard for that movie.
Speaker 3: Guys, this guy is like the average Instagram user. It
Speaker 3: is really, that's so basic, a very vile, paper thin
Speaker 3: kind of philosophy. Yeahs important like William Blake or some
Speaker 3: shit like not trying to be like Flower with Shakespeare. No,
Speaker 3: he's just like I saw a movie once.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, the.
Speaker 3: Advertising guy made me cry because it was beautiful. How
Speaker 3: you Think Different?
Speaker 2: Yeah, he taught me how people should be encouraged to
Speaker 2: embrace their special gifts I'm going to yeah, tend to
Speaker 2: go be really abusive to a bunch of.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm so inspired.
Speaker 2: So eventually Apple opted to write their own or the
Speaker 2: ad team opted to write their own original piece for
Speaker 2: the Think Different ad, which wound up being titled Here's
Speaker 2: to the Crazy Ones. And I don't want to read
Speaker 2: the text of all this, I will tell you it
Speaker 2: ends on the lines. And well, some may see them
Speaker 2: as the crazy ones, we see genius because the people
Speaker 2: who are crazy enough to think they can change the
Speaker 2: world are the ones who do. Steve wrote some of it,
Speaker 2: including a line about how like some people are the
Speaker 2: ones who pushed the human race forward, and he clearly
Speaker 2: is thinking about himself here right like, this is clearly
Speaker 2: he this affects him because he sees himself as one
Speaker 2: of these misfit, rebel trouble makers who saw things differently
Speaker 2: and move the world forward, and definitely saw things differently
Speaker 2: some things and definitely moved to the human race. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I'll give him that forward. Well, some of that's debatable,
Speaker 2: I guess, well, it depends on how you feel about
Speaker 2: some of the stuff.
Speaker 3: Are going to do really funny though, everything you're saying
Speaker 3: about this guy is he was actually very standard. He
Speaker 3: thought he was this big daring He had some he
Speaker 3: clearly was able to like notice trends and whatever.
Speaker 2: He had a couple of like legitimate insights. But he
Speaker 2: was like very very conventional in a lot of ways.
Speaker 3: And I really think different in the sense that I
Speaker 3: try and sell something for a profit, and I also
Speaker 3: hire the fucking pepsi marketing guy so we can do
Speaker 3: the thing that everyone else is doing. And my vibes
Speaker 3: come from movies.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's the same as everyone else when it comes
Speaker 2: to like, yeah, let's lay off some people, a bunch
Speaker 2: of people when we don't need to to boost the
Speaker 2: stock price. Yeah, let's bring in a marketing guy to
Speaker 2: run things, because obviously running a company is all about sales,
Speaker 2: you know, like a lot of these kind of basic
Speaker 2: corporate things. He's the same as everybody else, and he's like,
Speaker 2: to an extent, the same as every other stingy rich
Speaker 2: guy in a lot of ways. He has this sense
Speaker 2: of aesthetics, right, both in terms of how to market
Speaker 2: things and in terms of like what do people want
Speaker 2: a device to look at? That is like that's his
Speaker 2: real That's the thing that I think it's responsible for
Speaker 2: a lot of his success and unlike the nineteen eighty
Speaker 2: four ad this he used to the crazy One, ADS
Speaker 2: moves a shitload of computers right. Isaacson's book gives an
Speaker 2: amusing description of the struggle to find a narrator for
Speaker 2: this quote. In order to evoke the spirit of Dead
Speaker 2: Poets Society, clown, Jobs wanted to get Robin Williams to
Speaker 2: read the narration. His agent said that Williams didn't do ads,
Speaker 2: so Jobs tried to call him directly. He got through
Speaker 2: to Williams's wife, who would not let him talk to
Speaker 2: the actor because she knew how persuasive he could be.
Speaker 2: They also considered Maya Angelou and Tom Hanks. At a
Speaker 2: fundraising dinner featuring Bill Clinton that fall, Jobs pulled the
Speaker 2: president aside and asked him to telephone Hanks to talk
Speaker 2: him into it, but the President pocket vetoed the request.
Speaker 2: They ended up with Richard Dreyfus. Oh God, I like Dreyfus.
Speaker 3: But like yes, ever step down.
Speaker 2: Though it is funny that like Robin Williams's wife gets
Speaker 2: a call from Steve Jobs, He's like.
Speaker 3: No, do not know this.
Speaker 2: It was a funny room with Steve Jobs. It's no
Speaker 2: one that's love, right, that's that's someone who legitimately is
Speaker 2: looking at for your best interests.
Speaker 3: I'm also like Robin Williams, a horrifying depression. I won't
Speaker 3: put Steve Jobs anyone near him. No, no manipulative criton.
Speaker 2: I think Tom Hanks could have given him what for,
Speaker 2: but that's probably why Tom Hanks had no interest in
Speaker 2: working with him. I would have been fun seeing him
Speaker 2: and Maya Angelou have a conversation, though, My god. So,
Speaker 2: speaking of Jobs's friendship with Bill Clinton, you probably will
Speaker 2: not be surprised to hear that our former president reached
Speaker 2: out to his buddy, Steve masterful manipulator of the media,
Speaker 2: for advice on a little problem he was having. Here's
Speaker 2: Business Insider quote. In the middle of the Monica Lewinsky scannal,
Speaker 2: President Bill Clinton called Steve Jobs to ask him what
Speaker 2: he should do about it. Steve Jobs reportedly gave Clinton
Speaker 2: this advice, I don't know if you did it, but
Speaker 2: if so, you've got to tell the country. There was
Speaker 2: apparently a long silence on the other end of the line. Later,
Speaker 2: when Chelsea Clinton was a Stanford Steve Jobs loan, the
Speaker 2: Clinton's country house nearby so he could spend time with her.
Speaker 2: What a fascinating relationship. I call you and I've I've
Speaker 2: cheated on my wife publicly in front of the entire country.
Speaker 2: You give me a house when I want to hang
Speaker 2: out with my daughter.
Speaker 3: Great?
Speaker 2: Mm hmmm.
Speaker 3: What strange relationship? Not problematic, nothing weird happen in that.
Speaker 2: I don't know how much because this is I think
Speaker 2: comes from Jobs talking to Isaacson a lot of this,
Speaker 2: but like, I don't know how much. I guess I
Speaker 2: don't disbelieve that Bill Clinton would call Steve Jobs for
Speaker 2: advice on infidelity. I kind of I kind of don't believe. Jobs'
Speaker 2: first response was, if you did it, you've got to
Speaker 2: tell the country yea, to.
Speaker 3: Do the right ste Jobs also, good lord. The conspiracy
Speaker 3: theory is tearing this kind of stuff much be going nuts.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it is really funny, Like this is like the
Speaker 2: elite talking. Yeah, yeah, this is the elite, and it
Speaker 2: it's always framed as being so like much more sighting
Speaker 2: than it is. Like they're they're definitely like both people
Speaker 2: who have done some damage, but their conversations are about
Speaker 2: like shit, shit, everyone caught me cheating what do I do?
Speaker 2: And him being him everything else and then lying later
Speaker 2: that he said to tell the nation.
Speaker 3: Well, Steve Jokes probably said was well you're fully justified
Speaker 3: first of all. First of all, if you tried just
Speaker 3: like about his soul.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, let me tell you you had I murdered.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you're the person you could do that, right.
Speaker 2: No, no, no. It is interesting to me that Steve
Speaker 2: was willing to lend Bill and Hillary a house so
Speaker 2: they can see their daughter where she's at Stanford. He
Speaker 2: he has a very different reaction to Lisa. She gets
Speaker 2: into I think Harvard, and Steve is angry at her
Speaker 2: because like she wants to go to college, and she's
Speaker 2: kind of like, well you're rich. I feel like you
Speaker 2: can pay for it, right. He's like, I'm a dropout.
Speaker 2: Why don't you become a dropout. Then he takes it
Speaker 2: to Hawaii on like a trip with his family and
Speaker 2: repeatedly is like, hey, sure would be better to just
Speaker 2: have a vacation every year than pay for your college. Huh.
Speaker 2: Don't you just want to go on vacation every year
Speaker 2: instead of go to college? Like he kind of tries
Speaker 2: to bribe her with trips to Hawaii if she'll drop out.
Speaker 3: How about we do both? You rich?
Speaker 2: Fuck yeah, come on, man, you are Steve Jobs.
Speaker 3: I had to eat out with the trash as a child,
Speaker 3: when you humiliated being a dave. And Buster's like, fucking like,
Speaker 3: I should go to Hawaii and go to college.
Speaker 2: It'd be one thing if he had like a principled
Speaker 2: I'm not gonna, you know, pay for you once you're
Speaker 2: an adult or whatever, but like what he does instead,
Speaker 2: as he starts paying for her to go to college,
Speaker 2: and then in like her second semester, he cuts her
Speaker 2: out and she has to find out about it when
Speaker 2: the school calls her, and he's, what tells you about this?
Speaker 2: So Steve has some neighbors, his mansion's neighbors who were
Speaker 2: like some of his friends. But they meet Lisa and
Speaker 2: they see how he treats Lisa and it kind of
Speaker 2: turns them off of Steve. And when she she just
Speaker 2: comes to them because she doesn't know what else to
Speaker 2: do when he's like refusing to pay for her tuition,
Speaker 2: and they're like, well, you could just live with us
Speaker 2: outside of school and we'll pay for your tuition because
Speaker 2: we're all so rich, and this isn't really that much
Speaker 2: money to us, my god.
Speaker 3: Which is like, yeah, everyone wipes Steve Johnson's ass for him,
Speaker 3: keep on the smell of it. He didn't do it
Speaker 3: for himself.
Speaker 2: A lot of ass wiping goes on for this man.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this guy would have been just a failure had
Speaker 3: these had like one person just not know.
Speaker 2: No fuck it. Yeah yeah, so yeah. A huge part
Speaker 2: of the new Apple is the industrial design genius of
Speaker 2: Johnny Ive. As Chief design Officer for Apple, I was
Speaker 2: largely responsible for the look and feel of the iMac, MacBook, Air, iPhone,
Speaker 2: and iPod. Because the whole tablet and smartphone ecosystem today
Speaker 2: is made in the image of Apple products, it can
Speaker 2: be easy to forget what a sea change they were
Speaker 2: from what had come before. I was one of those
Speaker 2: weird nerds who had a friend of mine that gave
Speaker 2: me there. It was some sort of micro Soft running
Speaker 2: PDA like a year or two before the iPhone came out,
Speaker 2: and all I could really do with it was like
Speaker 2: take notes and I could play like a like a
Speaker 2: fucking eight bit version of Heroes of Mit and Magic three,
Speaker 2: which is all I had ever wanted from a computer
Speaker 2: to that point in my life. And I was very
Speaker 2: happy with this thing. But people didn't like this stuff.
Speaker 2: It was like heavy, It couldn't communicate with anything. It
Speaker 2: was just kind of a real pain in the ass.
Speaker 2: And they all you all had to like use a
Speaker 2: stylist input commands, You had to like learn a gesture
Speaker 2: language with the stylust. It wasn't like intuitive or whatever.
Speaker 2: And I've kind of one of the things that makes
Speaker 2: him important is he's got this like sense of what
Speaker 2: do people want to hold in their hand, what feels good? Like,
Speaker 2: what is the kind of thing that people will not
Speaker 2: just use but adopt as part of their life and
Speaker 2: fucking line up outside of a store in order to
Speaker 2: get the latest model of right and Jobs falls in
Speaker 2: love with Johnny. He calls him his spiritual partner and Jobs,
Speaker 2: his wife would later tell Isaacson most people in Steve's
Speaker 2: life are replaceable, but not Johnny.
Speaker 3: Stave forgot an idea for a new watch, Like he
Speaker 3: must have just called him later on Steve got a
Speaker 3: new idea.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's the only guy Steve would pick up the
Speaker 2: phone for. And it's very funny to me that his
Speaker 2: wife is like, he could replace all of us, but
Speaker 2: this man, yeah, this man who makes a good phone.
Speaker 2: Steve Jobs is only real love the man who was
Speaker 2: nice at making phones out of metal. Now, the success
Speaker 2: of the new Apple also owed a lot to Jobs's gut.
Speaker 2: His appreciation for the way I've designed products was part
Speaker 2: of it, but his dog and understanding of what people
Speaker 2: didn't want to hold in their pocket was part of it,
Speaker 2: a big part of the iPhone's initial success. Jobs again,
Speaker 2: he's certainly he was kind of beyond his technical capacity
Speaker 2: when Wozniak was building the Apple, too.
Speaker 3: He is well.
Speaker 2: Beyond it for the iPhone. A lot of his job
Speaker 2: with the iPhone is like looking at the different iterations
Speaker 2: of it before market and being like, it's not ready yet.
Speaker 2: It's not ready yet. It's not ready yet. And I
Speaker 2: don't know how to judge that on an objective lens
Speaker 2: other than that the iPhone sells like the iPhone right,
Speaker 2: Like clearly he was right, you know.
Speaker 3: But also that's one thing that Jobs jobs really, it's
Speaker 3: his one thing he really had, which was he knew
Speaker 3: when something was ready. Vision probably wouldn't have gone out
Speaker 3: under his works. I don't think so, No, no, And
Speaker 3: honestly that is the big change upon Apple. They'll shove
Speaker 3: shit out the door.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and they'll even they'll start like the Apple. The
Speaker 2: news right now is they just cancel their self driving car.
Speaker 2: I don't think Jobs ever starts that program because I
Speaker 2: think he might partner with an automotive company. Sure, but
Speaker 2: like get into the car business. Like, no, man, I
Speaker 2: don't think that's really something.
Speaker 3: If he would have got into it and then had
Speaker 3: to cancel it, he would have laid off the people
Speaker 3: in a much more literal sense.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think we would have learned if he'd lived longer,
Speaker 2: a lot about him because he he didn't live past
Speaker 2: the era of his competence, right. He understood smartphones and
Speaker 2: tablets and computers and what people wanted out of them,
Speaker 2: how they wanted to use them, what the future was
Speaker 2: of that. Once we moved, we're watching the industry scramble.
Speaker 2: It's why shit like AI and before that fucking NFTs
Speaker 2: and before that, you know, self driving tech and all
Speaker 2: this shit has these different like periods of like absolute
Speaker 2: obsessions because nobody really knows what the future. AI is
Speaker 2: the thing that feels most like it, right because it
Speaker 2: impressed people so much when they saw how far chat
Speaker 2: GPT was, So everyone is jumping on that bandwagon. We
Speaker 2: would actually have learned a lot about Steve's actual level
Speaker 2: of brilliance if he'd gotten to this point, because I
Speaker 2: do wonder would he have been like, no, NFTs, clearly
Speaker 2: bullshit self driving tech. It's not going to get there
Speaker 2: as past fast as people. He wouldn't, you know, he
Speaker 2: wouldn't have.
Speaker 3: Liked crypto enough. He didn't own the ecosystem.
Speaker 2: I suspect he would not have fallen like he would.
Speaker 3: Not have touched anything where he did not control the
Speaker 3: entire end to end process. He would have been like,
Speaker 3: what the fuck? People can own part of a thing
Speaker 3: I built?
Speaker 2: But uh, I think there is a maybe a version
Speaker 2: of him where he's kind of doing the Musk loop,
Speaker 2: where he like follows Musk to try to make an
Speaker 2: electric car when he sees how well test. I don't
Speaker 2: know that that's the case. I can't. Maybe it's more
Speaker 2: likely it wouldn't have, but we don't. I mean, he
Speaker 2: doesn't get enough for us to know when he's finally
Speaker 2: passed his depth of understanding. Would he have just scrambled
Speaker 2: like everyone else for bullshit or would he have been like, well, fuck,
Speaker 2: I don't know what to do. He chose to jump
Speaker 2: on every bad wagon. Yeah, he made the decision today,
Speaker 2: he did. Actually, it was all his choices. Yeah, we are.
Speaker 2: We are building to that, thankfully. So while the iMac
Speaker 2: was a successful product, it was the iPod that first
Speaker 2: made a massive impact on daily life outside of the
Speaker 2: world of computing for Apple. Right, and you young listeners
Speaker 2: might not remember this, but back around to the turn
Speaker 2: of the century, there was this big kerfuffle over piracy
Speaker 2: and the recording industry. Right, most cool people like me
Speaker 2: were stealing all of their music and occasionally the IRIA
Speaker 2: would catch one of us and send us to fucking
Speaker 2: prison for the crime. Fresh Box twenty albums right related
Speaker 2: prison sentences. Yeah, yeah, and people responded to this largely
Speaker 2: pirating even harder. Jobs. Part of his conception of iTunes
Speaker 2: is I'm going to put a stop to that, right,
Speaker 2: and he does to a significant extent, Like the iTunes
Speaker 2: is kind of what kills piracy as it had been
Speaker 2: as like this thing that all young people are doing.
Speaker 2: And it's because Jobs understands the people who've been arguing
Speaker 2: for piracy are right. The big thing piracy advocates would
Speaker 2: always say is we're not stealing from artists. We're fucking
Speaker 2: up the recording industry, but they fuck over artists, and
Speaker 2: by for free spreading the music these people are making,
Speaker 2: we're overall benefiting them. Right now, that's not been it,
Speaker 2: that's debatably true. Right, There's a lot of ways in
Speaker 2: which artists have been heard, especially with the era of Spotify.
Speaker 2: I'm not papering over that. But what was accurate about
Speaker 2: that that job saw is that, like, well, they are
Speaker 2: right that if people have really easy, if they don't
Speaker 2: have to buy like a thirty dollars album or whatever
Speaker 2: to get one song, people will buy more music overall.
Speaker 3: Right, And that was the other thing in England, at
Speaker 3: least albums will like twenty quick like yeah, I remember
Speaker 3: thinking about listening to Dark Side of the Moon, an
Speaker 3: album I'd never heard of. I went to HMV and
Speaker 3: it was twenty five quid. Yeah, oh, same album, like,
Speaker 3: same size album, whatever, And it was just I did
Speaker 3: not hear that album for years and years and years,
Speaker 3: because yeah, I don't know if I'm gonna like any
Speaker 3: of this. Nobody on you owned it. Yeah, And so
Speaker 3: being able to buy a song was actually pretty cool.
Speaker 3: And also CD's a big and annoying.
Speaker 2: And jobs the way I mean, he has a big
Speaker 2: role in this, Right, This isn't just a thing that
Speaker 2: happens by coincidence. He personally negotiates a deal with the
Speaker 2: record companies where he can offer songs for ninety nine
Speaker 2: cents apiece, which makes them for the first time a
Speaker 2: song is cheap enough to impulse by. And this is
Speaker 2: what fucks up piracy, right is because piracy advocates had
Speaker 2: been kind of right, people would buy music if it
Speaker 2: was less of a fucking ripoff, right, and jobs kind
Speaker 2: of proves that because they do now this devastates a
Speaker 2: lot of the music industry, and particularly because record companies
Speaker 2: are record companies. They don't lose their shirts, but they
Speaker 2: do fuck over artists worse.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: I'm not saying we're at a worse period now or better,
Speaker 2: but like the ways in which artists get fucked over
Speaker 2: has certainly changed as a result of iTunes, right, and
Speaker 2: iTunes led directly to the era of Spotify and other
Speaker 2: music streaming services. One of the things that's happened in
Speaker 2: that world is that musicians can basically just make a
Speaker 2: living touring now, right, he don't make the kind of
Speaker 2: money from album sales or from people listening to because
Speaker 2: we don't even sell albums anymore. People just like you Spotify,
Speaker 2: and that doesn't bring nearly the same amount of money.
Speaker 2: And you can't blame Jobs for all. He was not
Speaker 2: orchestrating that whole process. But there's a good article on
Speaker 2: the subject on the impact his decisions have on the
Speaker 2: music industry by John Naughton, who writes music played an
Speaker 2: outsize role in the evolution of the Internet. As Larry
Speaker 2: Lessig put it in Free Culture, file sharing music was
Speaker 2: the crack cocaine of the Internet's growth. It drove demand
Speaker 2: for access to the Internet more powerfully than any other
Speaker 2: single application. Jobs became the first licensed dealer in that drug,
Speaker 2: and iTunes provided the saddle that abled Apple to write
Speaker 2: the Tiger. And that's a very apt way of reading it.
Speaker 2: Right then, that is more or less what happens with
Speaker 2: the iPod now. The birth of the smartphone era coincided
Speaker 2: almost perfectly with the start of the Obama years, and
Speaker 2: by the time Barack Obama was inaugurated in two thousand
Speaker 2: and nine, Android smartphones had started to creep out onto
Speaker 2: the market, and the iPhone had rapidly gone from a
Speaker 2: thing rich people you know, bought because who else can
Speaker 2: afford five hundred dollars for a phone? Am I right
Speaker 2: to the hottest tech product in history? And Steve had
Speaker 2: an odd relationship with Obama. Right. The Obama years and
Speaker 2: the early smartphone years are very directly tied together. And
Speaker 2: it's hard to remember now, but people were excited about
Speaker 2: smartphones at one point, and people were also excited about
Speaker 2: Barack Obama. Right. There was this belief that he was
Speaker 2: going to be this historically progressive candidate, and there was
Speaker 2: also this belief that he was a literal communist who
Speaker 2: was going to like turn the world into communist China.
Speaker 2: And I want you to guess ed where was jobs
Speaker 2: closer to on that, I.
Speaker 3: Guess he was more towards the capitalist side.
Speaker 2: He was, in fact, more towards the capitalist side. Like
Speaker 2: a lot of boomers, he seems to have grown a
Speaker 2: bit more conservative as he aged. I don't fully get
Speaker 2: his I think he was at least frustrated with Obama,
Speaker 2: but because of his perception the president was like anti business,
Speaker 2: which is a wild thing to accuse Barack Obama of being. Yeah,
Speaker 2: not at all accurate. In the fall of twenty ten,
Speaker 2: Steve's wife, who was a major donor to the Democratic
Speaker 2: Party told him that the president was really psyched to
Speaker 2: meet with him, and then Obama had reached out to
Speaker 2: her and he was like, we'd love to have Steve
Speaker 2: come by, and Jobs is like, look, if you invite
Speaker 2: me personally, then all come by. But it's got to
Speaker 2: be an invitation from like the president for me to
Speaker 2: meet with.
Speaker 3: Him, from Barack Obama at White House dot Gov.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, And eventually Obama does it, right, that does
Speaker 2: show you somewhat of like where his social position is
Speaker 2: at this point that he is able to make that happen.
Speaker 2: And when they finally did meet, he unleashed a rant
Speaker 2: at Obama that would not have sounded entirely out of
Speaker 2: place on The Rush Limbaugh Show. Atacked the education system
Speaker 2: and claimed it was crippled by unions. Quote until the teachers'
Speaker 2: unions were broken, there was almost no hope for education reform,
Speaker 2: he said, And what did he mean by that? Well,
Speaker 2: one proposal he made was that principals should be able
Speaker 2: to hire and fire teachers at will school should be
Speaker 2: open until six pm for eleven months of the year.
Speaker 2: And it's like, it's always fun to me when people
Speaker 2: make proposals like this after bragging about how they dropped
Speaker 2: out of school early. I'm not saying there are other
Speaker 2: countries that keep kids in school longer.
Speaker 3: How does he feel about principles being allowed to kick
Speaker 3: kids out who blue stuff up?
Speaker 2: Yeah, well right, right, shouldn't be able to kick kids
Speaker 2: out for setting off explosives. Fucking But also, like, it's
Speaker 2: such a fraud thing when you're the guy who's always like, no,
Speaker 2: why would you want to go to college. People don't
Speaker 2: need to go to school. You learn everything you need
Speaker 2: to know from the world and intuition to like kids
Speaker 2: need to be locked in school eleven months out of
Speaker 2: the year, never let them free.
Speaker 3: Oh so this guy who's full of like mysticism and
Speaker 3: philosophical thoughts and all of these grandiose ideas turns out
Speaker 3: to just be a very fucking boring conservative guy.
Speaker 6: Yes, like that is kind of one of this mystified
Speaker 6: technological figure whoeveryone has given this godlike sense and he's
Speaker 6: just a boring conservative man.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: It's kind of like Barack Obama in that he appeared
Speaker 3: to be appeared to be kind of like center left, like, oh,
Speaker 3: fighting for the consumer, but really just working for the establishment. Jeez,
Speaker 3: and lending the establishment house. Yeah, when we need to
Speaker 3: establish and lend him.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we need to. Like the guy who does the
Speaker 2: nineteen eighty four commercial is like, schools need to be
Speaker 2: more like factories. I could go into like a there's
Speaker 2: a lot of debate over what is good for schools.
Speaker 2: That's not this podcast. I just think it's funny how
Speaker 2: it's inconsistent with some of the shit jobs was saying
Speaker 2: out in public. But you know, it is consistent the
Speaker 2: quality of the advertisers of this project product podcast, whatever
Speaker 2: we call ourselves. Anyway, here's some ads. We're back. So
Speaker 2: when Steve is having this meeting with Barack Obama, the
Speaker 2: most pressing issue that he presented to the President was
Speaker 2: the USA's troubling lack of skilled engineers. This, he says,
Speaker 2: is what has forced him to outsource Apple's manufacturing to China.
Speaker 2: He's like, look, the number of workers we need to
Speaker 2: make all these products. You got to have thirty thousand
Speaker 2: engineers to support them, and the US simply cannot graduate
Speaker 2: that many people with engineering degrees. So that's why I
Speaker 2: have to make everything in China. That's a very funny
Speaker 2: thing to say, and this article. Quote from an article
Speaker 2: in the Huffington Post continues, You're headed for a one
Speaker 2: term presidency, he told Obama at the start of their meeting,
Speaker 2: and insisting that the administration needed to be more business friendly.
Speaker 2: As an example, jobs describe the ease with which companies
Speaker 2: can build factories in China compared to the United States,
Speaker 2: where regulations and unnecessary costs make it difficult to them.
Speaker 2: So I want to see what does he mean by this,
Speaker 2: because he's saying, I would love to make these things
Speaker 2: in America, but we don't have enough smart people and
Speaker 2: we're too tied down by regulations for me to have
Speaker 2: factories here. So let's talk about how Steve's ideal factory works.
Speaker 2: It is true that by twenty eleven, Apple employed something
Speaker 2: like seven hundred thousand people in China, and because a
Speaker 2: workforce that large needed about thirty thousand engineers, China was
Speaker 2: maybe the only place to produce Apple products. Isaacson probably
Speaker 2: focuses a lot on this part of the claim and
Speaker 2: less on what was an equally large reason why it
Speaker 2: had to be China, which is that China does not
Speaker 2: enjoy the same safety in union and basic quality of
Speaker 2: life considerations that we have in the United States for
Speaker 2: this kind of work, right, The kind of minimal guarantees
Speaker 2: we have of worker quality of life are too much
Speaker 2: for an Apple factory to meet and still have an
Speaker 2: affordable product. The reality is that a lot of modern
Speaker 2: consumer technology cannot function without cities worth of abused workers. Right.
Speaker 2: This is not just an Apple thing. This is every
Speaker 2: tech product. We all know this. This is our This
Speaker 2: is our tied up child and abasement at omeloss.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: Although we don't live in ome loss because everything still
Speaker 2: sucks in we're doing this. But that's a separate question.
Speaker 3: Are we the bostards?
Speaker 2: Are we the bastards? Yeah? Yes, always. But a big
Speaker 2: part of like why this is the way the tech
Speaker 2: industry works, why you have so much churn in products,
Speaker 2: why products have to be produced at the rate that
Speaker 2: they are produced, is not organic entirely. It has to
Speaker 2: do with decisions made by Steve Jobs and made when
Speaker 2: he was kind of inventing the foundations of what we
Speaker 2: now call the consumer electronics industry, which to a significant extent,
Speaker 2: he did a lot of what we just consider consumer
Speaker 2: tech today is shit that Apple started doing. Right. Part
Speaker 2: of that is like the way products get released, you
Speaker 2: know how you have these like big showy releases and
Speaker 2: like you have to be able to sell a bunch
Speaker 2: of stuff at once, right right after. Like so much
Speaker 2: of Apple's business gets formed from the idea of every
Speaker 2: time we have a new product on the market, fans
Speaker 2: are going to line up at the door to get
Speaker 2: the new model, and we will get a bunch of
Speaker 2: free coverage from the news on that, a bunch of
Speaker 2: pr from that will get a stock retuch from that.
Speaker 2: When you do that, there's a cost to the workers
Speaker 2: to make that possible.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: That was not inevitably the way that the company was
Speaker 2: going to be structured. It was structured this way because
Speaker 2: of things that jobs did. These consumer frenzies are a
Speaker 2: big part of like why what made Apple apple? And
Speaker 2: another big part of what made Apple apple was planned
Speaker 2: obsolescence and this gets worked into the rest of the
Speaker 2: industry too. Certainly some people would have always done that,
Speaker 2: but the fact that Apple does sets a precedent. Right,
Speaker 2: the Apple too, and it's not a precedent that was
Speaker 2: in Apple's DNA. The Apple too had been anti fragile.
Speaker 2: This is a product that is considered good for thirteen
Speaker 2: years that's unimaginable from modern computing, right, with fairly minimal
Speaker 2: changes in terms of like the actual structure of the thing,
Speaker 2: and people can upgrade it themselves so that you can
Speaker 2: use it longer. Right. It's a great product because you
Speaker 2: can make it what you need it to be and
Speaker 2: keep it relevant. And Jobs hated that he wanted disposable technology,
Speaker 2: and Apple embraced a policy allegedly. I say allegedly because
Speaker 2: there are lawsuits about this around planned obsolescence. This blew
Speaker 2: up in a big way in twenty seventeen when Apple
Speaker 2: was apparently caught throttling battery performance on older phones. They
Speaker 2: claim this is to prevent shutdowns on aging phones. It's
Speaker 2: a safety. We have to do this basically, right, It's
Speaker 2: the only way to make it work. But it also
Speaker 2: happened to push people into buying new phones early, not
Speaker 2: just because Apple's throttling the battery. Perhaps they did have
Speaker 2: to do that to prevent a shutdown, but because they
Speaker 2: made it impossible to swap in new batteries. If you
Speaker 2: could easily replace the battery, you can keep the iPhone
Speaker 2: going longer. But it makes it a lot uglier and grosser,
Speaker 2: seeming to Steve, even though the amount of waste generated
Speaker 2: from swapping a battery is vastly less than swapping an
Speaker 2: entire phone. Apple has faced numerous lawsuits over planned obsolescens,
Speaker 2: including in France and Italy over their process of serialization,
Speaker 2: which links spare parts to specific years of iPhones via
Speaker 2: serial numbers in such a way that it stops independent
Speaker 2: repairs from fixing them using generic parts. And when you
Speaker 2: bring this stuff up, it can just seem like, well,
Speaker 2: Apple is like a company like any other, and they
Speaker 2: all do some stuff that's fucked up. It's important to
Speaker 2: note I think when you cover him, the way we
Speaker 2: have all of this is ste This is very consistent
Speaker 2: with how he's always thought about these products. You shouldn't
Speaker 2: be in there, you shouldn't be meddling with them. You'll
Speaker 2: buy what we give you, and you'll buy a new
Speaker 2: one when it gets.
Speaker 3: You'll be thankful for the chance.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you'll be thankful for the chance. That's a
Speaker 2: twenty something year plan for this man. This is not
Speaker 2: just something that evolved at a cost cutting because it
Speaker 2: made sense. This is part of his overall vision for
Speaker 2: how much computing should work right. And I don't think overall,
Speaker 2: all the whole body of allegations and lawsuits and like,
Speaker 2: is this really planned obs lescens or is it something
Speaker 2: less severe? I don't think all that's meaningful. So as
Speaker 2: you will understand basically what's happening here, what is worth
Speaker 2: laboring over are the consequences towards Apple's policy. The fact
Speaker 2: that these machines are largely disposable and that they are
Speaker 2: kind of pushing you to upgrade regularly means you need
Speaker 2: a fuckload more of them being made, And the means
Speaker 2: that you need to be able to make a lot
Speaker 2: of them in a very quick span of time, and
Speaker 2: the only way to do that is by really hurting
Speaker 2: certain people. In twenty ten, fourteen workers for Apple's biggest supplier,
Speaker 2: Fox Con committed suicide at work. Several more employees attempted
Speaker 2: suicide by throwing themselves off of massive high rise dorm towers.
Speaker 2: These are places where they live that are factory towns
Speaker 2: built into the factory right. Another twenty workers had to
Speaker 2: be talked down from committing suicide by management. Now, the
Speaker 2: fact that all of this happens within the span of
Speaker 2: a year creates a sensation in the news and subsequent
Speaker 2: reporting detailed how fox Con policy was to publicly humiliate
Speaker 2: workers for poor performance and forced hours of unplayed overtime.
Speaker 2: I want to read a quote from a fox Con
Speaker 2: worker interviewed by Brian Merchant in twenty sixteen.
Speaker 3: Quote.
Speaker 2: Zoo and his friend were both walk on recruits, though
Speaker 2: not necessarily willing ones. They call fox Conn a foxtrap,
Speaker 2: he says, because it tricks a lot of people. He
Speaker 2: says fox Conn promised them free housing, but then force
Speaker 2: them to pay exorbitantly high bills for electricity and water.
Speaker 2: The current dorms sleep eight to a room, and he
Speaker 2: says they used to be twelve to a room, but
Speaker 2: fox Con would shirk social insurance and be late or
Speaker 2: fail to pay bonuses. And many workers sign contracts that
Speaker 2: subtract a hefty penalty from their pay if they quit
Speaker 2: before a three month introductory period. So this is like
Speaker 2: a vile situation. It's the only way to get as
Speaker 2: many people as you need to have for this right
Speaker 2: without paying too much for the devices themselves that people
Speaker 2: would be willing to pay. Maybe then people ought to
Speaker 2: be pay right Apple. You know when there are all
Speaker 2: these suicides in twenty ten, it causes a ton of
Speaker 2: bed priss for hours, and Apple puts a lot of
Speaker 2: pr behind. They set out a list of standards for
Speaker 2: the humane treatment of their factory workers, and anyone who
Speaker 2: wants to make products for Apple has to abide by
Speaker 2: these rules, right, and even move some of their production work.
Speaker 2: Now they just shift it to other factories mostly not
Speaker 2: all that far away. Are they better? Maybe a little bit?
Speaker 3: Who's gonna know? The Chinese media, well.
Speaker 2: Exactly, And so the international media does start to investigate
Speaker 2: this stuff, right. That's where Brian Merchants twenty sixteen, History
Speaker 2: of the Ifi one Device comes in. Yeah, and it's
Speaker 2: a really interesting book, really good book. That's why we're
Speaker 2: going to quote from it here. But Brian describes how
Speaker 2: Jobs personally responded to the news hoopla over this rash
Speaker 2: of suicides and all of the human shrapnel from his
Speaker 2: dream quote. Steve Jobs, for his part, declared, we're all
Speaker 2: over that. When asked about the spate of deaths and
Speaker 2: pointed out that the rate of suicides at fox Conn
Speaker 2: was within the national average. He actually he like compares
Speaker 2: the factory to an American town and like, is ev
Speaker 2: one of our towns will probably have this suicide, right,
Speaker 2: and it's like one thing, man, we've got.
Speaker 3: Guns people off themselves all the time.
Speaker 2: People are fleeing themselves off buildings.
Speaker 3: Like yeah, oh my god.
Speaker 2: It's also it's worth noting he's saying, well, if you
Speaker 2: compare it to the national average, Well, if you compare
Speaker 2: it to like the average of an entire country with
Speaker 2: people of all age ranges living and working and having
Speaker 2: relationships in their regular lives, maybe it does. But this
Speaker 2: is a building full of extremely young gig workers who
Speaker 2: are mostly there planning to do a job for six months.
Speaker 2: I don't think they're suicide rate is naturally as high
Speaker 2: as you've made it.
Speaker 3: I just also, would you trust those numbers?
Speaker 2: No, of course not. That's the other thing, Like.
Speaker 3: No, Layah has lied, Like yeah, and even then, is
Speaker 3: it He's basically saying, you can have a little bit
Speaker 3: of suicide if you'd like, yeah, it's okay, just people
Speaker 3: kill themselves.
Speaker 2: Some people are going to kill themselves at our murder factories. Yeah, yes,
Speaker 2: it's I mean, it's it's one of those things like
Speaker 2: Fox High has to put out anti suicide nets and
Speaker 2: like invest in like massive surveillance to try to like
Speaker 2: catch people before they do this. Which like, maybe you
Speaker 2: would have gotten a better response from just making work
Speaker 2: less miserable. Maybe that was the problem. But no, the
Speaker 2: nets sound good, then nets sound good.
Speaker 3: Need more phone? Phone good?
Speaker 2: Now you Americans need more phone and we desperately want
Speaker 2: your money. Yes, yeah, it's all good, it's great. I
Speaker 2: love that this is behind every line outside of an
Speaker 2: Apple store. But also when I start taking out my
Speaker 2: own ass about that this is behind whatever phone I
Speaker 2: have right now, right like one way or the other.
Speaker 2: Maybe do less of an extent with some companies, but
Speaker 2: not much. Yeah, I think the problem here there's always
Speaker 2: going to be some level of like fuck upedness somewhere
Speaker 2: in the line of a product, even one that you need,
Speaker 2: and we do need smartphones. They could have been from
Speaker 2: the beginning easier to repair and modify in a way
Speaker 2: that reduced this cost, and that didn't happen to an
Speaker 2: extent because Jobs didn't want it to happen, because even
Speaker 2: before the smartphone was a glimmer in anybody's eye, he
Speaker 2: wants devices you can't fiddle with. Right, We've talked a
Speaker 2: lot about suicides at Fox confactories, and I think that's important.
Speaker 2: I'm sure most of you were aware that this was happening.
Speaker 2: I want to drill a little bit into how the
Speaker 2: work directly is involved with that, and some of it
Speaker 2: has to do with policies at FOXCN that encouraged the
Speaker 2: humiliation of workers who make mistakes. One employee interviewed by
Speaker 2: Merchant explained, when the boss comes down to expect the work,
Speaker 2: if they find any problems, they won't scold you. Then
Speaker 2: they will scold you in front of everyone in a
Speaker 2: meeting later. It's insulting and humiliating to people all the time.
Speaker 2: Punish someone to make an example for everyone else. It's systematic,
Speaker 2: and Brian continues. Zoo says there was another suicide a
Speaker 2: few months ago. He saw it himself. The man was
Speaker 2: a student who worked on the iPhone assembly line, somebody
Speaker 2: I knew, somebody I saw around the cafeteria. After being
Speaker 2: publicly scolded by a manager, he got into a quarrel.
Speaker 2: Company officials called the police. So the worker hadn't been violent,
Speaker 2: just a He took it very personally, Zoo says, and
Speaker 2: he couldn't get through it. Three days later, he jumped
Speaker 2: out of a ninth story window and jobs. I don't
Speaker 2: believe he instituted this policy. I'm certain he wasn't specifically
Speaker 2: aware of it, right, This is much lower on a level,
Speaker 2: and I think he would have paid attention to it.
Speaker 2: Is interesting though, that this is exactly how he would
Speaker 2: run a factory. Yes, because this is a factory, right
Speaker 2: he did racing work as is kind of his m Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: this is completely I don't think he had any other
Speaker 2: than like, in making this business exist and in pushing
Speaker 2: for a company that would need to be this way
Speaker 2: to meet his quotas. I don't think he had a
Speaker 2: direct role in this, but it is consistent with how
Speaker 2: he treated people. That Brian Merchant book is pretty fucking devastating.
Speaker 2: There's a bit in it after this where he's like,
Speaker 2: he's trying to answer the question of like, why didn't
Speaker 2: you know I heard about some of these suicides? Why
Speaker 2: didn't I hear about this suicide? To like that you
Speaker 2: just like reported to me. Zue and his friend look
Speaker 2: at each other and shrug. Here's someone dies. One day later,
Speaker 2: the whole thing doesn't exist. His friend says, you forget
Speaker 2: about it. Jesus Christ, damn if that doesn't sum up
Speaker 2: the twenty first century in a nutshell right there, Like
Speaker 2: oh god, yeah, you care the first time, then it
Speaker 2: keeps happening and you just kind of get used to it.
Speaker 2: You know. That is how all these people have like
Speaker 2: hacked our brains as they realize that, like, if you
Speaker 2: just pushed through with the evil and keep doing more evil,
Speaker 2: eventually we get tired and go home.
Speaker 3: Elon Musk is a reprehensible human, don't get me wrong.
Speaker 3: But Steve Jobs was behind some truly awful human rights things.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, And people are rightly angry at like
Speaker 2: some conditions from Tesla factories they ought to be. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and this is the same kind of thing. It's on
Speaker 2: a grander scale because he's been much more successful.
Speaker 3: Guy's killed themselves so often that you're kind of like, oh,
Speaker 3: I'm sorry, which suicide are you referring to?
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. Jobs of course saw nothing to be concerned
Speaker 2: with in the situation. He tells one reporter after a
Speaker 2: rash of suicides. Foxcott is not a sweatshop. It's a factory.
Speaker 2: But my gosh, they have restaurants and movie theaters. He's like, look,
Speaker 2: it's it's nice, so it can't it's not even a swash.
Speaker 3: Its conditioning.
Speaker 2: Idiot, And one of the things I love about Brian
Speaker 2: Merchant is he like basically breaks into a fox Con
Speaker 2: factory while it's like in operation to look at it,
Speaker 2: like just just to like walk around and get a feel.
Speaker 3: For Honestly, he Brian Merchant, he's pretty cool.
Speaker 2: Against him, yeah, at least based on God. Every time
Speaker 2: I say I've had nothing against someone, someone's like, actually,
Speaker 2: did you know that a dog in nineteen eighty nine?
Speaker 2: I don't know. Man, don't tell me if he did
Speaker 2: a bad of capitalism. There's there's there's too many bad
Speaker 2: people out there for me to get all that, all
Speaker 2: that burnt out of shape about every one of them.
Speaker 2: I'm just going to pretend everything's fine forever now. That
Speaker 2: same year, one hundred and fifty were employees at fox
Speaker 2: Conn got together on the roof of a factory and
Speaker 2: threatened to commit mass suicide. This was a month or
Speaker 2: two after Tim Cook had visited Lungwa to meet with
Speaker 2: suicide prevention experts about conditions and Apple factories. But workers
Speaker 2: argued that no changes had really been made and they
Speaker 2: saw threatening mass suicide. It's the only leverage they had
Speaker 2: to force Apple to act. And these guys are to
Speaker 2: be fair They're like, we don't blame Apple, we blame
Speaker 2: Fox con but we know that making a big public
Speaker 2: stick is the only way to make anything happen. The
Speaker 2: more damning case to make against Jobs in particular and
Speaker 2: Apple in general, because it's made in his image, is
Speaker 2: that his vision of mass consumer pocket computing necessitated factories
Speaker 2: like this in a way that even other handheld device
Speaker 2: manufacturers did not. Some of this was due to Apple's
Speaker 2: quality control standards, which were high, but others have to
Speaker 2: do with the fact that he was obsessed with secrecy.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: Part of why these factories can't just be normal factories.
Speaker 2: They need to be closed loops, right, is that he
Speaker 2: is obsessed with nothing getting out about what's coming in
Speaker 2: the future, what the next Apple product is going to be.
Speaker 2: Jobs's whole vision was that the first time anyone knows
Speaker 2: what we're really making, I am a bouncing it on
Speaker 2: stage and it's ready to go. There's no drip drip
Speaker 2: of information. You get it all at once, and then
Speaker 2: the fucker's on sale and you go stand out in
Speaker 2: front of a store to buy it.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 2: This strategy, this is a legitimate strategy. It works for Apple,
Speaker 2: but it necessitates kind of being crazy people about keeping
Speaker 2: what you're working on under wraps. And I found this
Speaker 2: right up from a former employee describing his experiences in
Speaker 2: Apple in the United States.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: Having been at Apple and also at a large defense
Speaker 2: contractor where I would routinely walk by areas that said
Speaker 2: top secret clearance required, I can say that Apple simply
Speaker 2: put more effort into making secrecy part of the culture.
Speaker 2: A few things I noticed at Apple code names for
Speaker 2: every product. No one referred to products any other way.
Speaker 2: Team members who are also on special teams don't tell
Speaker 2: their coworkers what they do. Black windows and frosted curtains,
Speaker 2: trash bins were monitored, and you get stuff like that.
Speaker 2: Apparently if you were on the iPhone at certain points,
Speaker 2: you're basically working in like a black box in an
Speaker 2: air gapped room, Like this is CIA shit, right.
Speaker 3: And I don't resent them for that.
Speaker 2: What?
Speaker 3: No, what's that for? Are you going to get to
Speaker 3: the Jason Chen iPhone force situation?
Speaker 2: Oh God?
Speaker 3: Was that the guy who who found he got an iPhone?
Speaker 3: That's for that? Someone left in a bar and Steve
Speaker 3: Jobs had the police fucking raid his house and he
Speaker 3: called him. He's like, get me the phone, get a phone.
Speaker 2: This was like a huge article in early tech journalism.
Speaker 2: I remember how jealous we all were. And then yeah,
Speaker 2: Chin gets fucking raided by the police basically ruined his life.
Speaker 2: Yeah oh really, I wasn't actually aware of this. I
Speaker 2: should have dug any anymore.
Speaker 3: They just they tore through him in his life. There
Speaker 3: was like legal consequences, but thankfully Gizmono got cleared of
Speaker 3: But it was just they treated it like he'd stolen
Speaker 3: Steve Jobs's kid, which we all know he would have
Speaker 3: treated with less seriousness than this in the iPhone.
Speaker 2: Great guy. And it's obviously if you are being paid
Speaker 2: what these Apple engineers are being paid, and you know
Speaker 2: the job is crazy secrecy and compartmentalization, that's your choice,
Speaker 2: you know, being abused, right, you can set that standard
Speaker 2: at your company, and I don't think that is unethical,
Speaker 2: but it does. The fact, the way that this translates to,
Speaker 2: I want our shit to be made in places where
Speaker 2: the employees we can lock them down and have control
Speaker 2: over them. That is part of why again Fox kind
Speaker 2: would have been doing some messed up shit without Apple.
Speaker 2: But like Apple's need for secrecy has a big impact
Speaker 2: on how they treat their people right, and it's key
Speaker 2: to Jobs as visions. So he is an integral part
Speaker 2: of this really ugly system at its foundation. Now, to
Speaker 2: understand why Jobs was so obsessed with secrecy, you have
Speaker 2: to understand that Jobs put a lot of effort into
Speaker 2: making Apple seem fundamentally different from the rest of consumer tech.
Speaker 2: Every one of their competitive We've done coverage of the
Speaker 2: of the of cees, the Consumer Electronics show you know
Speaker 2: here at cool Zone. I used to go to Mobile
Speaker 2: World Congress and Barbolona. Apple never went to that.
Speaker 4: Shit.
Speaker 2: These are where like every Lenovo, you know, fucking Microsoft.
Speaker 2: They yeah, oh wait, no, you're right, len I've always
Speaker 2: done well. They did private meetings this year.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: But most big tech companies, at least especially during this
Speaker 2: period of time, would do their releases around one of
Speaker 2: these conferences. Apple never did, and they would they did
Speaker 2: their own shows they had like Macworld and shit. And
Speaker 2: that element of surprise is such a central part of
Speaker 2: how Apple operated under Jobs and still does today that
Speaker 2: it has a name Surprise and Delight. In one internal
Speaker 2: twenty fifteen presentation, someone at Apple wrote, our surprise and
Speaker 2: delight business model requires a huge volume of labor for
Speaker 2: only a short period of time as we ramp products.
Speaker 2: In other words, because the goal is to surprise the
Speaker 2: consumers to send them scrambling to line up outside of
Speaker 2: Apple stores. To create the kind of unhinged buds that
Speaker 2: help them sell their products, they needed a highly restricted
Speaker 2: workforce that was available for limited periods of time. In China,
Speaker 2: this necessitated the huge hiring of numbers of workers of
Speaker 2: what are called dispatch labor. Right these are productction pinch hitters.
Speaker 2: These are guys who are shipped out to factories on
Speaker 2: short notice in order to deal with surges in demand.
Speaker 2: And because they're basically folks you're pulling in off the
Speaker 2: street or whatever to like help you meet a deadline,
Speaker 2: they don't benefit from pay and worker protections like regular employees.
Speaker 2: This becomes such a problem in China because of Apple's
Speaker 2: need to hit these targets that in twenty fourteen, China
Speaker 2: enacts a new law to crack down on the process,
Speaker 2: which was seen as part of why these jobs are
Speaker 2: so miserable. You don't have nearly the kind of protections
Speaker 2: you're being lied to off and you're generally being stolen
Speaker 2: from And it's known that You're only going to be
Speaker 2: there a couple of months, right, so they can fuck
Speaker 2: you over. So in twenty fourteen, China mandates that only
Speaker 2: ten percent of a factory's workforce can be temps, and
Speaker 2: an internal memo Apple notes that this is basically death
Speaker 2: for them. Our surprise and a Light business model requires
Speaker 2: a huge volume of labor for only a short period
Speaker 2: of time. We are making it difficult for our suppliers
Speaker 2: to comply with this law, as ten percent dispatch is
Speaker 2: simply not enough to cope with the spikes in labor
Speaker 2: demand we are putting during our ramps. So all of
Speaker 2: this what I've just quoted is after jobs passed. But
Speaker 2: this is all starting under him, at his direct at
Speaker 2: his direction, and it's all being continued by his protege,
Speaker 2: Tim Cook. Apple commissions a two year study with Pegatron
Speaker 2: around this point, one of their manufacturers, and it shows
Speaker 2: that regular employees have better working conditions and are like
Speaker 2: you know, less likely to be suicidally miserable, and that
Speaker 2: if Apple keeps releasing products by this Surprise and Delight model,
Speaker 2: they're not going to be able to meet China's legal
Speaker 2: requirements and they're going to have to imserate more workers.
Speaker 2: An article by Wayne maw for The Information sums up
Speaker 2: what happens next. Apple weighed the pros and cons of
Speaker 2: pushing suppliers to comply with the law. If Apple forced
Speaker 2: suppliers to cut dispatch labor, it would eliminate regulatory risk,
Speaker 2: but drain resources, create costs, and delay product launches. On
Speaker 2: the other hand, Apple could continue to do nothing as
Speaker 2: long as local authorities didn't enforce the law. Apple executives
Speaker 2: decided to push facilities to reduce their use of dispatch
Speaker 2: labor only if it came a problem with local authorities.
Speaker 2: So they're just like, we just break the law and
Speaker 2: see if it's going to be a problem, and it wasn't. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: I mean again, at a certain point, you can't blame
Speaker 2: a shark if you throw a bunch of chum in
Speaker 2: the water, right, Yeah, I mean you can because these
Speaker 2: are people.
Speaker 3: In human rights abuses. Though you've got to give him that.
Speaker 2: He helped a lot of people innovate human rights abuses
Speaker 2: in some ways that are beautiful. And you know who
Speaker 2: else is innovative, maybe in the same way, maybe not.
Speaker 2: I don't know who's going to be the advertiser that
Speaker 2: comes on after this, We're back. Here's to the crazy ones.
Speaker 2: I want to see that recut to be about like
Speaker 2: raytheon Lockheed Martin show, like a fucking barrel bomb hitting.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, that rock that's not actually a rocket, it's
Speaker 3: got knives in it.
Speaker 2: Hey, the knife missile, Yeah, redo the old apple, think
Speaker 2: different ad But for the knife missile, just.
Speaker 3: As it's about to blow up, the knives come out.
Speaker 2: Ohoh, I mean that is thinking differently. It's the first
Speaker 2: defense product that was like, what if we didn't kill
Speaker 2: everyone's kids all the time, but what if.
Speaker 3: The people we killed we really fucking killed.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I want to see like some fucking weapons cellared
Speaker 2: in like a Steve Job's turtleneck being like just one
Speaker 2: more fixtures of like buses blowing up the several knives.
Speaker 2: What if we could kill fewer kids.
Speaker 3: But instead of exploding, there were seven knives. Oh, everyone's clapping.
Speaker 2: Yeah. The other day I was stabbing a man to
Speaker 2: death out in front of my house and I felt,
Speaker 2: what if we did this for politics? Internationally?
Speaker 3: I had a man stabbed the other day and it
Speaker 3: really made me think about the way we do business.
Speaker 2: The Greeks knew that the knife was the most efficient
Speaker 2: shape in nature, and so I put seven of them on
Speaker 2: the end of this rocket.
Speaker 3: But that's exactly like it is.
Speaker 2: Oh boy, So yeah, I hope I've made the case
Speaker 2: about Steve Jobs. It's like the actual long term, significant
Speaker 2: human consequences that he has. He's not the whole part
Speaker 2: of this, but he is Steve Jobs. He is a
Speaker 2: foundational person and like how consumer tech looks. So when
Speaker 2: we look at things that are now broad evils across
Speaker 2: all of consumer tech, it's important to note he has
Speaker 2: a big role in why those evils exist the way
Speaker 2: that they do. I'm not going to say that consumer
Speaker 2: tech would have ever been like a moral paragon, but
Speaker 2: that doesn't get him off the hook for his role
Speaker 2: in this right right, and I don't I don't know.
Speaker 2: Maybe you want to say it's inevitable anyone else would
Speaker 2: have made similar decisions. I don't know that not out
Speaker 2: of the don't know if they.
Speaker 3: Would have.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, he was kind of. He had to fight
Speaker 2: a long time to get anyone to embraces the customers
Speaker 2: shouldn't be able to make any changes at all, and
Speaker 2: it should be a close ed loop idea that was
Speaker 2: the thing he got attacked for for a while before
Speaker 2: being right, And yeah, maybe if he hadn't fought for it,
Speaker 2: there's some ugliness we could have avoided. We'll never know,
Speaker 2: But that doesn't remove his culpability here, right, So that's
Speaker 2: the long term evil stuff. Obviously, people are going to
Speaker 2: note that we're leaving out some of his brilliant business decisions.
Speaker 2: The establishment of Apple stores, right, which was a hugely
Speaker 2: influential move. A lot of people argued that it wouldn't work.
Speaker 2: It did, the launch of the iPad, the app store.
Speaker 2: But this is not a podcast where we list the
Speaker 2: achievements of billionaires at length, right. What's worth saying is
Speaker 2: that the period where Jobs helmed Apple after he came
Speaker 2: back was historically a good run, not just for Apple
Speaker 2: but for any company of any kind. And it was
Speaker 2: such a titanic success that when his cancer diagnosis came out,
Speaker 2: a New York Times reporter fretted that Apple was jobs
Speaker 2: and Jobs was Apple. Basically, this could tank a big
Speaker 2: chunk of the tech industry, right, And it didn't. By
Speaker 2: the way, Apple, they've made some bad calls, but have
Speaker 2: a lot of money at hand. They're doing all right.
Speaker 2: You don't need to worry for them, And maybe the
Speaker 2: fact that they have been so relatively successful in the
Speaker 2: period after his death is probably, at least when it
Speaker 2: comes to evaluating him as a businessman, something you should
Speaker 2: keep in mind. I think it's probably fair to say
Speaker 2: he was the most successful tech CEO of his generation.
Speaker 2: Maybe absolutely, Yeah, Like, it's kind of hard to argue
Speaker 2: with that, right.
Speaker 3: And he also managed to turn journalists into just drooling idiots.
Speaker 3: He had a not a high effect on journalists. I
Speaker 3: just want to read you something from o'malik that was
Speaker 3: published the day after the day that Steve Jobs died.
Speaker 3: I was going to read you a section because this
Speaker 3: whole thing fucking sucks. Mac iPod and iPhone they are
Speaker 3: like Silicon Valleys, Harry Potter, Luke Skywalker and eating life changing.
Speaker 3: And perhaps that is why I didn't want to meet him,
Speaker 3: interview him, or even talk to him. I had the
Speaker 3: opportunity on numerous occasions when I was attending Apples events,
Speaker 3: but I decided not to. To me, just the idea
Speaker 3: of Steve was powerful enough. The idea of Steve led
Speaker 3: me to follow my heart, make tough choices, be brutally honest,
Speaker 3: with myself and sometimes annoying people I love and always
Speaker 3: remember that in the end, it's all about making your
Speaker 3: customers happy. There are simple ways to get along with everyone.
Speaker 3: There are easier ways to get things done. There are compromises.
Speaker 3: But to me, Steve Jobs meant try harder, damn it.
Speaker 3: Your customers, brackets, readers, expect better than that. Steve Jobs
Speaker 3: taught me to care about the little things because in
Speaker 3: the end, little things matter. Steve Jobs was my muse.
Speaker 3: Trust me, he is the secrets to many of us
Speaker 3: in the valley, Mark Zuckerbug, Jeff Bezos, Dave Morin, Jack Dawsey.
Speaker 3: We're all part of the tribe called Jobs. There's a
Speaker 3: whole generation of entrepreneurs who ask themselves this one question,
Speaker 3: what will Steve do? Natch? What would have Steve done?
Speaker 3: This is meant to be someone who was a critic
Speaker 3: of the tech industry.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he is right that that is how all of
Speaker 2: these founder guys see it. But saying you feel that
Speaker 2: way too, and pretending to be a journalist is so embarrassing.
Speaker 3: Also so funny to be like, I won't talk to
Speaker 3: him because I'm too scared.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, that's just anti actual journalism. Whoom, don't speak
Speaker 2: truth to power, because then truth might not think you
Speaker 2: might think you're dumb and you have a picture of
Speaker 2: truth up above your bed and you really want to
Speaker 2: I mean, I feel that way. I have someone who
Speaker 2: is my muse that I feel that way about, and
Speaker 2: it's Werner Herzog. But when I say that purely because
Speaker 2: I want to cut someone's leg off with a chainsaw,
Speaker 2: that's the only part of his legacy I want for myself,
Speaker 2: I would also like to remove someone's leg with a chainsaw.
Speaker 2: So if you need a leg removed out there, listeners,
Speaker 2: hit me up.
Speaker 3: I got some inspiration.
Speaker 2: Yeah, every day I think is now the time to
Speaker 2: cut somebody's leg off with a chainsaw? And so far
Speaker 2: it hasn't been. But maybe that's what'll take us to
Speaker 2: the next level, Sophie. Sophie approves. Okay, I'm gonna I'm
Speaker 2: gonna start making.
Speaker 1: Some interesting My head off, Mike.
Speaker 2: So, Sophie, I'm gonna I'm gonna expense one of those
Speaker 2: battery powered ones. I've got a big Huskvarner right now
Speaker 2: and it's it's it's pain in the ass. Yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 2: we'll get something real convenient for taking off a leg.
Speaker 3: Imagine taking off a leg, but with a portable mechanism.
Speaker 3: The lelsy to enjoy the leg separation process.
Speaker 2: So, speaking of medical procedures that are ill advised, in
Speaker 2: two thousand and three, doctors found a shadow on Steve
Speaker 2: Jobs's pancreas during a CT scan. This turned out to
Speaker 2: be pancreatic cancer. And I would never make fun of
Speaker 2: somebody for pancreatic cancer. That's how my mom died. It's
Speaker 2: it's one of the worst ways I can imaginifying. It
Speaker 2: fucking sucks ass, right, and for most people who get
Speaker 2: that diagnosis, it is a guarantee of death. I had friends,
Speaker 2: two doctors, and I called both of them right after
Speaker 2: my mom's diagnosis, and both of them, and I'm glad
Speaker 2: that they did, said the same thing, which is, like,
Speaker 2: for whatever reason, we've just never gotten a good handle
Speaker 2: on this shit. There's not really any hope. And that's
Speaker 2: how I went into it, right, And that's how most
Speaker 2: people have to go into having pancreatic cancer. For one thing,
Speaker 2: By the time it gets discovered, you're usually in like
Speaker 2: stage four, right, like it's terminal. Jobs gets really lucky,
Speaker 2: he gets crazy lucky. He has pancreatic cancer, but it's
Speaker 2: a form of pancreatic cancer that only five percent of
Speaker 2: pancreatic cancer sufferers have that's actually really easy to treat.
Speaker 2: Like he gets the fucking golden ticket pancreatic yankey, he
Speaker 2: gets really lucky, the kind that's totally totally survivable if
Speaker 2: you just do what your doctors say right away. Right,
Speaker 2: you do want to get in there quick. But it
Speaker 2: was found early, so it's they're almost a very good chance.
Speaker 2: Given the kind of doctors he could afford, that he
Speaker 2: would have made a full recovery. But this is Steve Jobs,
Speaker 2: and Steve Jobs did not trust his doctors, So for
Speaker 2: nine months he delays taking any kind of real treatment
Speaker 2: and tries a quack diet to fight his cancer instead.
Speaker 2: He later tells Isaacson, I didn't want my body to
Speaker 2: be opened. I didn't want to be violated in that way.
Speaker 2: And like Bro, I get it's said that I've heard
Speaker 2: it said at least that like a lot of oncologists
Speaker 2: will often turn down chemo because if it's like a
Speaker 2: rough cancer or whatever, even if your chance is like
Speaker 2: you know, okay, it might not, you might not consider
Speaker 2: it worth it. I don't know. I'm no one to
Speaker 2: tell people what they should or shouldn't do there, but like,
Speaker 2: that's not what we This is like one of those
Speaker 2: things where his doctors are like, look, man, you can
Speaker 2: survive this thing. Nobody survives. If we act right now.
Speaker 3: You will be fine.
Speaker 2: Now I'm fit comfortable with letting somebody cut into me,
Speaker 2: and he spends he tries to like eat fruit and
Speaker 2: cure his fucking cancer for nine months. Isaacson puts this
Speaker 2: down to a fatal case of Jobs's reality distortion feeling, right,
Speaker 2: he uses this ability to talk other people into fantasies
Speaker 2: on himself and it works, and it kind of is
Speaker 2: what kills him, and that may in fact be what happened. Right,
Speaker 2: I think it's possible that that actually gives Jobs a
Speaker 2: little bit too much credit, that that is still viewing
Speaker 2: him as this almost super powerful figure, because what we'd
Speaker 2: say for anyone else is he read this fucking quack
Speaker 2: book by a fucking liar when he was a young man,
Speaker 2: and he never got over it, and he was never
Speaker 2: he was never able to like objectively look at reality
Speaker 2: and recognize that like nothing else he'd try to do
Speaker 2: as a result of this diet had worked. He got
Speaker 2: caught up in a fucking a little bit of like
Speaker 2: a cultic belief system, and he couldn't shake himself from it,
Speaker 2: and that's what killed him. We would say that about
Speaker 2: anyone else who refused a very treatable cancer that they
Speaker 2: could easily afford to treat because they believed that some
Speaker 2: shit about eating fruit would cure it. For jobs. Were like,
Speaker 2: he used his reality distortion field on himself. Helf this time.
Speaker 3: I don't know, he was just a dip shit.
Speaker 2: Well, he was a you know what, I'll even sell
Speaker 2: This happens to perfectly decent people in a bunch of ways.
Speaker 2: He fell for a con, That's what it is. He
Speaker 2: fell for a con. Yes, it happens. And by the
Speaker 2: time he decides to submit to surgery, the cancer had
Speaker 2: spread to his liver. And I was just saying, I'm
Speaker 2: not going to say falling for a con is a
Speaker 2: bad thing to do. What he does next is kind
Speaker 2: of evil. So he has liver cancer. His cancer has spread,
Speaker 2: his pancreatic cancer is no longer easily treatable, and the
Speaker 2: first thing he finds that's like going to kill him
Speaker 2: is that his liver is failing on him. Now, liver
Speaker 2: transplants are rare. People who need them usually have to
Speaker 2: wait a year or more, and only about a third
Speaker 2: of the people who get put on the liver transplant
Speaker 2: list actually receive a liver. Right. It's a tough thing
Speaker 2: needing to get a liver. There's not enough in fucking circulation,
Speaker 2: and so if you get a liver, someone else is
Speaker 2: not getting one. Now, obviously, I don't think that's math.
Speaker 2: Anyone who needs a transplant should generally be concerned with. Right,
Speaker 2: everyone's life is valuable, give it a go. There's no
Speaker 2: way to make But Jobs number one is not normally
Speaker 2: a guy who would have gotten the transplant in this situation.
Speaker 2: He still has cancer spreading through his body. He has
Speaker 2: a low chance of surviving.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: This is a case where I think responsible you'd be like, look,
Speaker 2: there are some people who could easily survive with this liver.
Speaker 2: You have let your cancer get so bad that there's
Speaker 2: really nothing we can do for you. But Jobs is
Speaker 2: rich and able to game the system. And the gist
Speaker 2: of what he does is that there are one hundred
Speaker 2: and twenty seven centers in the US that do liver transplants. Right,
Speaker 2: and each has its own waiting list, and so the
Speaker 2: waiting list where he was was super long. It was
Speaker 2: in most places. But he was able to pay someone
Speaker 2: to find a center in Tennessee where there wasn't much
Speaker 2: of a waiting list, and he gets his transplant in
Speaker 2: three months. This is not illegal, though the rules I
Speaker 2: think some rules have changed as a result of what
Speaker 2: Jobs did, but it is unethical. For one thing, again,
Speaker 2: he would not have needed the liver if his doctor,
Speaker 2: if he had taken the treatment. His doctor and his wife,
Speaker 2: in his sister and whatnot are all telling him from
Speaker 2: the beginning get treated. Because he doesn't listen to them
Speaker 2: he needs a liver, he winds up destroying his liver,
Speaker 2: and then he takes a liver that might have saved
Speaker 2: someone else's life and he dies anyway because his cancer
Speaker 2: had already gotten too advanced. And that is kind of
Speaker 2: killing another person. That's at least like negligent homicide when
Speaker 2: it's directly there, not like getting a transplant. But when
Speaker 2: number one, your need for it is directly the result
Speaker 2: of your own irresponsibility of like you specifically engineering a
Speaker 2: situation that was avoidable. This isn't even like, yeah, you
Speaker 2: had like a period of time where you were addicted
Speaker 2: and so your liver got fucked up later in life. Like,
Speaker 2: I don't blame anyone for that. We all have you know,
Speaker 2: people get second chances and shit, this is you had
Speaker 2: a treatable cancer and you didn't and so now you
Speaker 2: need a liver and you stole one kind.
Speaker 3: And I think, thinking about it for a second, I
Speaker 3: think it isn't that he has a reality distortion field.
Speaker 3: I think he just cannot admit that he's not smart
Speaker 3: enough than some things. Yeah, he tried to outsmart the
Speaker 3: California welfare system. Yeah, he tried to outsmart cancer and
Speaker 3: it did not work, and he very nearly did be
Speaker 3: other than the fact that his body had been wrecked.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, by just the sheer the horrors of fighting it. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's rough. One thing I'll say for the Steve Jobs story,
Speaker 2: it's very rare in that you have a guy who
Speaker 2: is a bastard and not only does he get his comeuppance,
Speaker 2: but he gets his comeuppance in a way that is
Speaker 2: his fall is directly tied to his hubris. Right, It
Speaker 2: would not be very funny if like, and then he
Speaker 2: just got a cancer that was untreatable and he died horribly. Right,
Speaker 2: that's just like, well, a guy who sucked died in
Speaker 2: a horrible way. Okay, It's almost like the universe gave
Speaker 2: him a chance.
Speaker 5: Yeah, like, let's see how smart you are on the
Speaker 5: fuck couple yourself a little to save your own life,
Speaker 5: and he doesn't, and he has to spend the remainder
Speaker 5: of his life knowing he'd fucked up.
Speaker 2: People who are around him I have heard in a
Speaker 2: number of times were like, yeah, he was like powerfully
Speaker 2: regretful of fucking up.
Speaker 3: He also looked like he was dying of a horrifying disease. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and no amount of money could stop that, No amount
Speaker 3: of fame could stop that. The universe very much humbled
Speaker 3: and then killed him.
Speaker 2: Well, it's no amount of power or wealth or fame
Speaker 2: could have stopped that. Listening to his wife could have.
Speaker 3: Yes, you know, listening to another person admitting someone else
Speaker 3: was right.
Speaker 2: And that is kind of we get this almost like fable,
Speaker 2: like moral lesson, very dark moral lesson. At the end
Speaker 2: of this, like you were given one chance to avert
Speaker 2: your horrible fate, and it was listened to the women
Speaker 2: in your life, and you couldn't do it, and so
Speaker 2: maybe that's a little, a little satisfying right. More importantly,
Speaker 2: by the end of his life, it is kind of
Speaker 2: worth noting he came to accept how awfully he'd treated
Speaker 2: Lisa in her childhood. He expresses this to Isaac Sinnet's
Speaker 2: a lot. It's the only thing he repeatedly. He seems
Speaker 2: to have genuinely gone out of his way to be like,
Speaker 2: I was very wrong in what I did here. And
Speaker 2: she spends some time with him near the end of
Speaker 2: his life, and he's very apologetic. And I want to
Speaker 2: close this by quoting for you how she describes one
Speaker 2: of their final conversations when he is on his deathbed.
Speaker 2: I want to say something. You were not to blame,
Speaker 2: he started to cry. If only we'd had a manual,
Speaker 2: if only I'd been wiser, But you were not to blame.
Speaker 2: I want you to know you were not to blame
Speaker 2: for any of it. He'd waited to apologize until there
Speaker 2: was hardly anything left of him. This was what I'd
Speaker 2: been waiting to hear. It felt like cool water on
Speaker 2: a burn. I'm so sorry, Liz, he cried, and shook
Speaker 2: his head side to side. He was sitting up, cradling
Speaker 2: his head in his hand, and because he had shrunk
Speaker 2: and lost fat, his hands looked disproportionately large, his neck
Speaker 2: too thin to hold his skull like one of the
Speaker 2: Rodean sculptures on the burghers of Calais. I wish I
Speaker 2: could go back. I wish I could change, but it's
Speaker 2: too late. What can I do now, It's just too late,
Speaker 2: he cried, and his body shook, his breath caught on
Speaker 2: his sobs, and I wished he'd stop after that, he
Speaker 2: said it, And I owe you one.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Sorry.
Speaker 3: I'm glad that woman got that closure.
Speaker 2: I'm glad she got that closure. And I'm glad he's
Speaker 2: he got that moment of knowledge of how bad.
Speaker 3: But I also question whether he would have got there
Speaker 3: without this much pain.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I mean I don't know that.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, I think if he had been healthy and
Speaker 3: lived to a grand old age, he would have probably
Speaker 3: been unapologetic to the fucking end.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Maybe.
Speaker 3: And if I'm being presumptuous, I'm sorry, this guy's a
Speaker 3: piece of shit.
Speaker 2: We'll never know, but it is kind of satisfying to
Speaker 2: of all of these guys, he got the ending you'd
Speaker 2: hope for all of them. Yeah, where they are brought
Speaker 2: low in their hubris. The universe forcibly shows them. Your
Speaker 2: wealth and your ingenuity have limits, and you cannot confront
Speaker 2: or surmount them. Right if they had been shown, if
Speaker 2: they all would be shown that at the end and
Speaker 2: have a chance to really regret the cruel things they've
Speaker 2: done in their lives, that's what we all want for them,
Speaker 2: is for them to have a blinding moment of awareness
Speaker 2: and horror and then go out right. Yes, And Steve
Speaker 2: got more of that than most of them do, and
Speaker 2: is not on a moral thing on his part. It's
Speaker 2: not like he spent the last of twenty years of
Speaker 2: his life working to undo his horrible crimes or anything.
Speaker 2: But there's at least a little bit of a satisfying
Speaker 2: arc there, So there you go.
Speaker 3: People still believe his suffering was not enough for the
Speaker 3: suffering he caused. Oh yeah, but maybe it was. Maybe
Speaker 3: that is enough. Maybe that's what these people deserve, because
Speaker 3: it wasn't just the pain cause than the suffering cause,
Speaker 3: but the fact that he really had to sit and
Speaker 3: suffer with its things thing of beauty. And I'm sorry
Speaker 3: if that sounds cruel, but I'm a father and the
Speaker 3: idea of dressing down a child. The juty of a
Speaker 3: parent is to raise a child. You have a juty
Speaker 3: to them. They don't have one to you. And for
Speaker 3: a man with this much power of money to be
Speaker 3: this reprehensible to child of any age, let alone a
Speaker 3: fucking seven year old, is just disgusting.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's nice that he had that feeling, and you
Speaker 2: nailed it there of being powerless, because so much of
Speaker 2: what made him him, of the way he treated people
Speaker 2: was wanting them to feel powerless. Right dressing down one
Speaker 2: employee in a room full of them, right fully fully
Speaker 2: luxuriating in the fact that like I am the founder,
Speaker 2: I am the I am your boss, and whatever I
Speaker 2: say to you, I can say to you, I can
Speaker 2: treat you like garbage. You are here at my pleasure
Speaker 2: and you mean nothing to me.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: That was clearly something that was very important to Steve
Speaker 2: to feel and express in his moments of anger. And
Speaker 2: then the universe said that to him, like, Oh, you
Speaker 2: don't really matter all that much. You're done fucked up.
Speaker 3: By is one chance, one chance to admit that you're fallible,
Speaker 3: one chance to give some to be vulnerable and let
Speaker 3: the world dictate your path. He's like, no, I will,
Speaker 3: I will eat my berries or whatever.
Speaker 2: It is such a face. It's like a Greek myth, right,
Speaker 2: it is. It's such a narratively satisfying downfall that you
Speaker 2: really never get those.
Speaker 3: And for such a big piece of shit. But you
Speaker 3: know what, the thing that really I'm not being in
Speaker 3: the tech industry since two thousand and eight and kind
Speaker 3: of earlier because I was writing about video games for
Speaker 3: this entire time, I thought Steve Jobs was kind of
Speaker 3: a bad guy. I had no idea the extent. And
Speaker 3: it makes me disgusted that the people who wrote so
Speaker 3: fondly of him at the time, because I refuse to
Speaker 3: believe that these stories that were new, that they just
Speaker 3: I'm sure tons of these were going around. But also
Speaker 3: even if they didn't know at the time, where's the
Speaker 3: fucking outcry? Now? Everyone should be so deeply ashamed of
Speaker 3: this man. This man is disgusting. The fact that this
Speaker 3: is the architect of modern technology is such a black
Speaker 3: mark on everyone. Everyone who appreciated him. What Mosburg should
Speaker 3: be ashamed of himself? The Wall Street Journal guy who
Speaker 3: so often talked about how great Joe's was and used
Speaker 3: to get calls fro him, and Steve has given me
Speaker 3: a new thing. He's doing a willing and able press
Speaker 3: operative for Apple.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they all had to buy into this image that
Speaker 2: Jobs had of himself, and I guess the benefit is
Speaker 2: they all did help to kill him in that right
Speaker 2: by like crafting that that feeling of like almost prophetic
Speaker 2: infallibility in the man.
Speaker 3: It is.
Speaker 2: It is like a black mark on the discipline as
Speaker 2: a profession, but it did, it did help take him
Speaker 2: the rest of the way over that line. I guess. So,
Speaker 2: I don't know where to go. Maybe if we all
Speaker 2: maybe if we all get really agreed it's been like
Speaker 2: three years really really going hard for Elon Musk to
Speaker 2: just absolutely drive him past the point of sanity. We
Speaker 2: can get him to I don't know, to try to
Speaker 2: turn his car into an actual spaceship and shoot himself
Speaker 2: into the sky.
Speaker 3: I mean, if you think about it, Yeah, this kind
Speaker 3: of fate might be what a white seal. I'm not
Speaker 3: talking about driving anyone's suicide. Don't don't want to punt
Speaker 3: his fight in such thing. However, mister Musku is the
Speaker 3: kind of guy'd be like, actually, the only correct way
Speaker 3: to solve my cancer is to use a computer algorithm
Speaker 3: that I will make. Yeah, and the algorithm is just like,
Speaker 3: take a bunch of ketamine.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. His AI tells him to treat his lymphoma
Speaker 2: with ketamine, and Grok is just like, oh boy, why
Speaker 2: begin take a bunch of cat We're all really reliant
Speaker 2: on Groc to make the right decision there. I mean,
Speaker 2: I do hope a downfall like this for all of
Speaker 2: these moguls right where they are brought low by their
Speaker 2: own their own personal weaknesses. I think the worst thing
Speaker 2: about a guy like Bill Gates, right, who's got his
Speaker 2: own share of bad things, is that Gates would never
Speaker 2: be this man. Bill Gates hires the best doctors in
Speaker 2: the world and then he listens to what they say, right, Yes,
Speaker 2: so he doesn't die, Yeah, yeah, he doesn't any die. Yeah.
Speaker 3: It's just it's great. It really has made me deeply
Speaker 3: reflect on that time in the tech industry because but
Speaker 3: there were people posting about crying when Steve Jobs died.
Speaker 3: Multiple people.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean I was reporting. I was bummed because,
Speaker 2: like Apple was exciting to report about. We'd had a
Speaker 2: couple of really exciting years, and I was like, oh,
Speaker 2: that's a bummer. You know, this guy who ran a
Speaker 2: company that I thought was really interesting to write about
Speaker 2: is dead. But I didn't know much about him personally.
Speaker 2: You know, I had started to because I had read
Speaker 2: Infinite Loop by that point, which I think is like
Speaker 2: the first really critical piece of big reporting on Jobs.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I remember, I was in the gym. I was
Speaker 3: living in Brooklyn at the time. I said, oh, fuck,
Speaker 3: Steve Jobs died, and none of the guys looked up.
Speaker 4: I actually went to the Apple store of the day
Speaker 4: that he died because my fucking phone battery stopped working.
Speaker 1: Wow, I'm so surprised.
Speaker 4: And they had this like giant, like shrine like photo
Speaker 4: of him on all the screens, and people at the
Speaker 4: Genius Bar were crying.
Speaker 2: Ah, Sophie, your phone died at the same time Jobs did.
Speaker 2: That means your new phone has his spirit in it.
Speaker 3: It's the spirit of jumps inside whatever phone you had
Speaker 3: backs while your phone just doesn't listen to you all
Speaker 3: the time because you're a woman.
Speaker 2: Refuses to work.
Speaker 4: There were We're very incompatible to that.
Speaker 3: Face ID just doesn't work.
Speaker 1: We're incompatible. But yet I can rock a turtleneck.
Speaker 2: Mm hmmmm hmm. Speaking of turtlenecks, hopefully fucking Mitch mcconnad
Speaker 2: dies next, fingers crossed, everybody all right ed? Where can
Speaker 2: folks find?
Speaker 3: You can find me at better offline dot com. You
Speaker 3: can find a podcast on my newsletter. You find me
Speaker 3: on Twitter, It's zitron, zitron dot, Besky dot Social on
Speaker 3: Blue Sky, and I'm technically on threads. But who gives
Speaker 3: a ship?
Speaker 6: Right?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Exactly who gives a ship? And who gives a
Speaker 2: ship at.
Speaker 3: You?
Speaker 4: I do?
Speaker 2: I love you. I'm the only one who will ever
Speaker 2: love you. Please continue listening to podcasts.
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