Also media. Anderson was found on the streets of the Inland Empire about to get on the freeway, covered in ticks and sleeze. And now she dresses nicer than everyone I know, Yeah she does.
She dresses nicer than me. I'm Robert Evans, host of the podcast that Sophie is trying to ruin by attacking my sense of fashion. You know whose sense of fashion is unimpeachable Anderson our guest today, Ed Zetron. Oh yeah, m hm.
They love me. They love me, and they love my fashion. They love how I talk.
Yeah, yeah, you are a classy man, Ed, And that's why you're personally offended by Steve Jobs, a man who was the opposite of classy in any given situation.
It's almost like he chose the most classless action every time look a remark, almost deliberately, but it's uncua. He was just an awe hole and idioto both.
I've had to you know, for me, I've had to go back and forth on this because on paper, I love the idea of someone going into meetings with all of these like finance ghoules and like being just like filthy and gross and like washing your feet at the table because like, fuck you, like I know you want you want in on this, and you'll give me the money anyway. That would be that's kind of a cool flex if you're just legitimately like a like a punk weirdo, like like a gross man who's like, yeah, I don't
I just don't give a shit. The fact that Steve's Steve always has to like dress it up with like, well, I don't need to shower because I know the secret of mucus and how to stop yourself from ever needing to bathe, or like, well, you shouldn't have to wear shoes because it blocks the energy waves.
You know, Anderson has a better hygiene.
Ropes easily well, Sleeve Drops really has bad hygiene now because he's dead.
Wow, you had for that really fun bad.
If he were sleep Drops, if he were like this, if he were just coming in being like, look, man, I woke up at like an hour before this meeting. I haven't bathed in four days because I have been doing nothing but like taking hallucinogens and mashing. And now I'm going to sell you a computer that's more respectable than like, actually, you don't understand I'm not gross. You just have understand health wrong. Let me tell you what my guru told me. One of those is more annoying to me.
This is the one charming thing about future Bosstard Sam Bankman freed, though, I do kind of respect that he'd go on meetings with Sequoia Capital or whoever and just play League of Legends in the background, like I'm I just gonna down and do this, Like yeah, sure, it's a shame. He was just like a giant scam artist. Yeah he was, But I do like it. It's more respectable for him to just well, I don't know. He kind of did dress it up though, too, because his
whole thing was like, at least the thing. It's hard to tell how much of this is Sam and how much of this is other writers just like looking for an angle, but like the I can't not be playing Legal Legends because my giant brain needs the distraction to focus. Is kind of like the modern is doing to ADHD what Steve Jobs did to Eastern mysticism, right where he like built this this aura around himself.
Is this like I went to the East and I learned the secrets of the Orient, and now I've brought back my wisdom to incorporate into capitalism. Right, that's just the back then version of like, well, my ADHD gives me a super brain, but I can never actually pay attention to anything Otherwise.
Me and my friends are the only people smart enough to be nice properly. Yeah, that'll be a good future one.
Yeah. Yeah, we've done some Sam Bankman Freed. We've done a lot of Sam Bankmanent Freed. I haven't done a dedicated one on the effect of altruists, but they are all in like a continuum from jobs, right, he would never He would be furious about and like disgusted in the effective altruists in much the same way as I think like people who grew up in the Internet using something awful hate four Chan, Right, yes, but not neither of them is better than the other. They're just in
a continuum. Right. Actually, I mean something off is a little better than four Chan.
But nice to high bar jobs with jobs, he would have been very angry at how fake it was, and possibly seen that as a challenge to make a real one.
But to know, yeah, one of the great I can talk myself either way into, Like Steve Jobs would have been the biggest crypto guy or Steve Jobs would have been a lone voice in the wilderness crying out for people to stop doing this dumb shit. Yeah, I think you could go either way, fifty to fifty. I think it's entirely because he does. We don't really cover it in these episodes. He does try briefly to get into social media later and you know, after he's come back.
To Apple iTunes pain Yeah right.
Yeah, yeah, I think that was it. It doesn't it's not really worth talking about because it's just like, yeah, it didn't work out, but it's not in a way that's
particularly compelling. What is compelling is how shitty Steve Jobs was now and a lot of ink has been spilled about Steve's hatred of meat, and it's to reiterate because like, that's the kind of thing I think an ethical person, even if you eat meat, can be like, well, yeah, like being vegans obviously better as a general rule than eating factory We can talk about like carbon and like, well, if you're like hunting or whatever a meat is that
lower carbon costs than you know, or picking up roadkill, that's all outside of it, but most people can agree, like, yeah, it's it's reasonable to think that our attitudes towards red meat as a culture's fucking nuts.
Right.
Maybe this was the thing that Steve's Steve was right about, because there is a lot of horrible stuff that goes
on in you know, the animal products industry. But it's important to reiterate here Steve's hatred of meat does not stem from any kind of real moral objection, right, Like he'll make he'll signpost about that from time to time, but he's pretty clear whenever you really get him talking about it, that it stems centrally from his these weird pseudoscientific beliefs he has about health and diet, and this is a kin to a religion for him, which is why he got really angry when people would like try
to make him sh right, because he's following he's on tech, as the scientologists say, so he shouldn't stink, and there's something wrong with you if you think he does.
You're the one with the mucus problem, buddy.
Yeah, And it's you know, I think that, you know, I definitely have known people who were who were vegetarianter vegan who like if a friend you know, or a family member they were if with ordered meat, they could get kind of like snippy at that person. I think I've ever met someone who is a vegetarianter vegan who would be shitty to a small child for wanting to order meat, right, And that's the kind of guy Steve
Jobs was. Right. Oh yeah. So when Steve's daughter Lisa was in her early grade school years, her father came back into her life and this meant a few awkward visits at first, mostly centered around trips to like skating and the like, but they did gradually overtime expand And one thing I will say for Steve is that his relationship with his daughter evolves, right, And that does show he has some capacity for growth as a human being, which I do think separates him from a lot of
the people who came after him. Like musk Rite, he does have more ability to grow than some of these people have. This is not a rapid or a smooth process, though. One year, Lisa's cousin Sarah came to visit her and her mother. Now this was back before like Steve had re entered their lives, when they were still on welfare. Her aunt Kelly had invited them in and kept a roof over their head during this, Like really crucial period
of poverty. And so when you know Steve has a chance to meet with like their daughter, you might think, well, maybe he'd want to be extra nice to her because like this family took care of his daughter when he
kind of abandoned her for a period of time. Right, he seems to have been angry about this instead, and not angry at himself or even angry at like Kathy, Chrisanne's sister, which would have been wrong, but at least more understandable than what he did, which was get incredibly pissed at this small child, his daughter's cousin, who I think is about seven. This everything that's happening, this is he's doing this to like a first or a second
grade girl. So when he meets it's during this family dinner he's having with Chrisanne and Lisa in Stanford, and Lisa describes that as soon as she sees him, she's immediately aware that her father doesn't want to be here, and his mood was like black soot in the air. Right, That's how she describes it in her book, which is wonderfully evocative.
That's what you want from you that yeah, yeah, So it comes time to order dinner, and Chrisanne and Lisa both avoid in a red meter poultry because they know Steve, right, and they know that if we order red meter, if we order poultry, he'll get like shitty at us.
Right, So they order like fish or something because I think he does eat fish. But Sarah, who doesn't know Steve at all, this seven year very young girl, orders a hamburger right right. Lisa is immediately horrified. I wanted to muffle her to protect her and to protect myself. The trick I learned later was to give him less surface area to knife, so he would stab someone else, always someone if not me. Now that is such a I live with an abuser thing to say abuse, Yeah.
Yeah, like that is changed my habits to make sure I didn't get in trouble.
Yeah, and I'm always looking for who can be the target of their ire other than me, right, like what because this person is just so unpredicable child age? Yeah, and here's another kid. So things get more and more tense, you know, as they're they're waiting for the food to arrive. And then the food arrives, Sarah gets this burger sat down in front of her, and Steve gets angrier and angrier at her quietly at first, until this occurs quote after we'd taken a few bites, my father's face shifted
and tightened. What's wrong with you? He asked Sarah what she said She was chewing on a bite of meat. No, he said, really. At first, it seemed that he was acting her to answer him. What was wrong with her? Why did she miss social cues? Why did she have such a biting, high voice at the top of the register, always calling for attention as acute as a baby crying? His voice became high pitched and piercing. You can't even talk, he said. You can't even eat. You're eating shit. She
looked at him. I could tell she was trying not to cry. Have you ever thought about how awful your voice is? He continued, Please stop talking in that awful voice. I couldn't believe it was happening, even as it was happening. Steve, stop it right now, my mother said. I could see him through Sarah's eyes, or I thought I could. If having a father around was like this, it wasn't so great. I wish I wasn't here with you, he said. I don't want to spend another moment of my life with you.
Get yourself together, pull yourself together. He talked loud enough so the people at other tables could hear him. Sarah slouched in her chair and looked at the table and began to cry. Steve, my mother said stop. You should really consider what's wrong with yourself and try to fix it, he said. At this point, he got up and went for the bathroom, leaving a small child stopping behind him. Like that is wildly hostile. He is worse than Elon Musk. He is worse than all of them.
Steve Drugs is the most evil tech guy. I am sorry, what a fucking scumbag. Jesus is rare that I am shocked by sheep, but Jesus, h fuck, oh my god.
Whatever, Like the are good people, but like, I don't think Elon Musk would do that to a seven year old, Like that's even such.
He values all fifteen of his children. Yeah, yeah, god, it's.
Not like it'd be one thing if you were to tell me, like, I can imagine any of these shitty tech guys like yelling snapping at a kid. I can imagine most parents snapping kids because everyone does it right. It's not good. But it's universal. This is not snapping at a kid. This is like specifically psychologically abusive, noticing that she has kind of a speech impediment and like laying into her for that right, mocking her voice, telling her to get herself together.
She's like, eight, this you fucking sposed to have together?
What is she meant to get together?
Yeah, that's such a wild thing to accuse a small child of get your shit together.
Can't get your shit together? What are you doing with your life? Mm hmm yeah, I can't unshowered to spend my time with you.
Yeah, Oh my god, what a what a weird asshole? So it's it's cool, like this night ends with chris An and Lisa having to explain to Sarah after dinner, like why why Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple worth a quarter of a billion dollars, was like there basically had to be like, it's not your fault. He's just a.
Dick terribly So your father's a fucking awshome.
Yeah. Yeah. So one of the frustrations I've had when researching this book is that many of the other books about Jobs by Isaacson and Moritz and Malone and stuff, they'll describe him being verbally abusive to employees, and they'll use those terms. They're not really like mincing words, but they don't really give a lot of detail, right, They'll usually just say, like, he was shitty to someone because
he yelled at them about this or whatever. What I like about Lisa's book and why I think this is such a useful addition to the guy the Jobs canon is that this is not just somebody who like maybe walked past as Steve was being shitty, or like heard some stories from some other people just being like, oh, yeah,
you know, he could be a dick. This is like somebody who had both at one point was traumatized by him, but also has grown up enough that they are able to contextualize and put in pretty unsparing detail how he treated people around him. Right, It's not just sort of like a recollection of a horrible thing he did. It's somebody who knew him for a long time and has enough distance from that from her childhood to like contextualize his behavior. And I value it a lot for that.
You know what, I remember when Steve Jobs died. I remember the death. I remember reading these things like oh Malek who ran a cycled Gigo home at the time, these teary fucking things about this great man who died. I just think the entire tech industry needs to have a fucking referendum on this guy. This is monstrous.
He's such a bad man.
He's such a horrifying creep. It's one thing to it's he screamed at the mobile me people. We know that one. He's screamed he fired people in the elevators. And I'm sure you've got so much worse to share, But this is horrifying.
This isn't just.
This isn't just. It's one thing yelling at a grown as man. It's another thing excoriating a child for their lack of eloquence or at all h for anything, even if they did something wrong. You don't yell at children.
Yeah, yeah, it like it'd be one thing if like she had broken something and he'd flip. That's still really wrong. But at least there was like there was like a thing that was that you can say had caused a problem, right as opposed to like, yes, a fucking eight year old girl ordered a hamburger, Dude, you can't expect her to have read the Weird Mucus book. You read had come to all the same conclusions.
Oh my god, keep going.
Sorry, I'm just yeah. So I think it's interesting. It's useful to study this book because of what it says about how Jobs treated people around him. Wosniak is again, he's kind of the only guy who has a partial immunity to any of this. And that's largely possible because Jobs in Wosniak. After the company has its IPO, they're gonna have relative little to do with each other, right they are in Neither of them is running the company.
They are both founders. They both have a lot of stock, and I think Steve is chairman of the of the board. He's got like a significant position as a result of how much stock that he owns. But they're just kind of like managing different chunks of the company. Wosniac stays with the Apple two. Right, that is the thing that is sustaining Apple's growth. That's nearly all of Apple's money up through the early nineties comes from the Apple too.
They don't stop selling this thing until nineteen ninety three, so this is this is around forever. And they're not just selling the same product, right, they're upgrading it. They're adding you know, different expansions, they're adding chips, they're i think at one point up Grady the processor. So they are like continually improving the Apple too. This is like a real important job. Wosniak is kind of for a while at least the point man on a lot of
that stuff. And this continues to be why Apple has money. Right, everything we're going to talk about with Steve has nothing to do with the Apple too. From this point forward, it's importantly that you understand what's actually funding everything Steve is doing right now is Wosney Ax, not just his invention,
but his like continuing maintenance of that invention. But Jobs hates the Apple too, and the reason for this is simple, he didn't make the fucker right, and the fact that the Apple everyone who knows, like everyone who knows anything, Jobs had no like, didn't have enough control over reality. When Apple is starting off, everyone knows it's Wosney as baby, right. People I think generally respect Steve for his vision, him being good at putting people together and all that kind
of stuff is that sort of thing. But the Waws is the genius here. And it's also pretty well known that, like the Apple, Too is successful in part because Wosniak wins the argument over how many expansion slots to have, and that's a thing that Steve was wrong about. So, for the sake of his ego, Jobs is going to spend the next decade and change throwing himself into every project that is not the Apple Too Right. And the first one of these projects is the creatively named Apple three.
It was set to be a groundbreaking computer capable of displaying This shows you how primitive shit is. One of the big selling points in the Apple three is it can display both upper case and lower case letters like we finally got it, guys, both council letters. Oh yeah, baby, yeah it really. Uh, it's remarkable how much better these things have gotten and how much worse a lot of other stuff has. But I don't need to get all
but Larry and g hot on you. Although it's appropriate now that that we're on Doune week as these episodes are being recorded.
So do the podcast.
Yeah fine, find a thinking machine, kids, and uh, you know, do it. Look up whatever they did on Dune and then do that. I can't be held legally responsible if I tell you to do it together. Dune to the thinking machines. Yeah, Google, Google Dune. Someone's going to sue us for reading all of the Dune books. And while they do that, you guys go listen to these ads. Oh my god, we're back, and I'm I'm just in
awe of that ad transition. It's the first Frank Herbert themed one I've done, but I think I'm gonna try it again. So yeah, we're at the Apple three. So Wozniak is safely close to it away keeping the company profitable, and Jobs is taking control of the Apple three project, and he lays out a design one of the things because this is his project, Like the Waws is not in the room, so there's nobody who he has to
like take seriously, he can just sort of dictate. He's like, we're going to design the case before we actually build the computer. Like I want to design this perfect case that like right, and then you build a computer around it.
The thing that needs to be dictated by the actual stuff, We'll design that first.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And this is a problem, right, because Job does not really know how to design a computer, and this says a lot about him. His attitude is we can figure out the internals later because What matters is how the fucking thing looks right on your tea meaning someone else, we meaning this team of people. I'm gonna scream at all day to no surprise. This does
not make a great computer. It is. They do eventually do some updates to it that it does kind of like grab find some niche uses, but it is not immediately successful. Particularly next to the Apple Too Right, Isaacson includes a lovely quote from an Apple engineer who struggled against Jobs on the project. This is one of the
people he's like verbally abusing at elevators. Quote the Apple three was kind of like a baby conceived during a group orgy and later everybody had this bad headache and there's this bastard child, and everyone says, it's not mine. And I think the funniest thing about that is the lie, sorry, it's not mine. And I that's, like, first off, an
extremely Silicon Valley way to describe a project. Like it's funny to me because of like the way this guy is describing Apple three is how Steve Jobs treated his actual child, right conceiving her and then denying the g entity responsibility for her. Jesus Christ, that's going to be extra ironic here in a second, So right around the time this is not that point, but it's coming right around the time the Apple three fails. Steve Wozniak is
in this horrible plane accident. He makes the worst mistake you can as a rich guy, and he gets into airplanes. That always ends badly, Like folks take it for if you suddenly make one hundred million dollars and you've always wanted to fly a plane, that is going to be how you'll die. Like you're not Harrison Ford. You're not going to bounce back like a Jelloman.
Avoid helicopter.
Avoid helicopters as well. Wosniak is not Harrison Ford. He does not bounce back right away. It messes him up, and he's he's basically out of the picture for five years. And it's not coincidentally kind of when this character of the company's founding bounces that the character of Apple is also kind of undergoing a change. Wozniak being out of the picture for a while isn't the only thing, but
it's kind of a sign of the times. Some of this comes down to the fact that CEO Michael Scott is like he's obsessed with trying to like be the adult in the room and take the company like in a more responsible direction. We needed these like hippie hacker kids when we were getting off the door. But now it's time to become like a traditional corporation. Jobs had always patterned Apple off of HP and as someone who's
interested in tech in the modern day. It's so weird that they used to be like the sexy hip tech company.
Well, but they also made their money quite boringly. Yes, and they have one of the old time loses, see as Meg Whitman.
Yeah, they have had an interesting journey since the time where Jobs is like idolizing them, but he does in this period of time. And so the fact that tech is kind of made in the image of aerospace and these early like you know, government contractors, means that like they're not these guys are not being used to being seen as disposable for the sake of a stock price. Right. Their dads really hadn't been and most of their dads,
like Wosniak, come out of this this aerospace world. So they're all very shocked when suddenly Apple starts acting like companies are increasingly going to act in the eighties and is like, hey, what if we lay off a bunch of people in order to pump the stock price? Right? This is particularly surprising because it happens just a couple of months after the IPO and it comes to be known in company law as black Wednesday. Now, this is
a Michael Scott production. Jobs is just a manager there, but he is a major stockholder, and he chose not to take any action to try to stop the layoffs, and in fact he's signed off on them. When a long time colleagues, here's what's happening, and like, tell Steve, this is no way to run a company. Steve responds acidly, how do you run a company? It's like, I don't know, man, maybe not firing everybody immediately after they make you two hundred and fifty million dollars.
My coping mechanism here is thinking that it's Steve Jobs dealing with actual Steve Carell from the office as Michael Scott, and that helps that this.
Helps, so for a while, he flits from idea Steve. After the Apple three, he kind of flits from idea to idea. At first, he thinks touch screens are the future, right, which is that's interesting that like in nineteen eighty one. Yes, I think, yeah, he really is, like he's ahead of the curve on a lot of stuff. He has some legitimate, like insight. The problem is that like I don't know if you ever try to use a touch screen, mean like nineteen ninety five, fourteen years after this, but shit, yeah,
that's like, yeah, they were horrible. It's because they were I think, resistive instead of capacity. But they also just like the tech was bad. And so he brings in a bunch of Apple engineers and is like, tell me about touch screens. I think this might be the future. And it's immediately clear to him. I only he understands why, but based on what they're saying, it's very clear that like touchscreens are not a reasonable thing for us to be trying to put into a consumer product right now.
And he the guys who are there like tell him, we were like made to prepare all this info, and he immediately checked out of the conversation and then just started like yellow asked for bringing him in convenient information. People on in the subreddit or there were a couple of people who were like, well, I don't think it's bad to like cry when you're sad, and I agree with you on that's what's I think it's worth shit talking Steve for is he's really mean to people just
by default. Whenever he is a disagreement, whenever they bring him bad news, and then whenever anyone challenges him on anything in a meeting, he starts crying. And that's like it's manipulative. That is also kind of an abusive tactic, right, And someone made.
A good point where it's like there are neurodivergent people who do cry, and like this is very much not that.
No, it was not crying.
Yeah, this is manipulative, very very different. And also if he met a neurodivergent person, he would make them cry. He would do so to prove they were weak. Like that's who he was. He was not Steve Jobs, was not someone who would ever show anyone else any kindness. So no, and also he definitely didn't cry because he was sad. He cried because he was annoyed and wanted someone to do something.
Yeah, and he's he doesn't know how to deal with being told no with any on anything, because I mean, his life has been one long show of people telling him yes. And in fact, Lisa's later going to kind of theorize, I think that part of why he was so angry about me for a while is that, like I was this this single piece of evidence against his perfection, right, that he had slipped up, and he just like couldn't forgive her for.
That, and that he couldn't tell her no.
Yeah, it's fucked up. So after kind of this like soul searching moment, going through a bunch of technologies, Jobs goes back and is like, you know what, we're just going to make another personal computer, but this one's going to be better. This one's not going to be like the Apple three. This is going to be the next Apple two. We finally cracked the code and we need to throw all of our resources into this project. And
he names this project the Lisa. Now, the immediate question one would have here is like did he name this computer after his daughter? And the answer, which Job's ultimately cop to, is obviously yes, right, obviously, yes he has a daughter named Lisa. And then a few years later he names a computer he's working on the Lisa.
Of course like that, but he acknowledges this one.
Well, not as yeah, he does acknowledge the computer or at least for a while. It's not going to go well. The lease is about as doomed as the Apple three. I mean, maybe it's a little bit more successful, but it's still not what Apple needs, right, And he does eventually abandon this, like he abandons his daughter, and he starts having like caught like conflicts within the Apple three team basically, And so he finds another personal computer project
at Apple. And the fact that there are so many of these projects going on is probably evidence that like there's not enough good direction coming in that you've got like multiple separate next generation PC teams that wind up fighting each other for resources, right, And so he comes into this this computer's what's being set as like this is going to be a personal computer for the masses. We're going to produce a cheap, simple PC that anyone can use off the shelf. Right. That is the idea
behind what becomes known as the Macintosh. And the guy who's like running this team is like a really well respected major engineer at Apple, and Steve like forces him off the team, and in order to take control of it, he's kind of shitty to the guy. He basically like burns his name a little bit to get him off of this project. And then once he's off the Lisa team and he's now heading the Macintosh team, he treats it exactly like he had treated Chris Anne. Like he's
publicly insults it. He belittles his former these people who just put on his team. He's like, yeah, the Lisa team were all assholes. They're all like dipshits. They're wasting all of our money. We should cut the project. Like he immediately abandons and betrays his old team while like now showering blessings on the new team. It's very much the same as how he treats like the people in his life. So I guess at least he's consistent.
So this is very much against the whole mythos of him being this master operator manager.
Yeah, look, this is.
This is actually early days startup bullshit. Yeah, just running burning eight fires, killing things based on how upset you are.
Yeah, and lighting like he's part of why the Lisa doesn't Like he costs the company a lot of money by like specifically fucking over the Lisa team this way, and the Macintosh is going to do a lot better than the Lisa had, but it's still not nearly we'll talk about this not nearly as successful as they had
planned on it being. And while he is lighting all of this money on fire and these really petty squabbles to like make a thing that finally is as good as the Apple Too, the Apple Too is continuing to sell like a motherfucker, right, Like all of Apple is built on this machine that he hates and is angry at, while he is like fighting wars with his co workers in order to try to get to make it.
No one give some credit for either. Now everyone knows this was everyone.
Likes was yeah, yeah, exactly, And that is what establishes. You have to understand here. You know, when I say Macintosh, you could do the oh wow, this is the moment. But like the Macintosh really ain't shit for a while. It takes a spell for it to become like a popular product. All of Apple's early reputation and all of this like cultural weight that it accumulates prior to the era. You know, when jobs comes back is due to the
Apple Too, Like that's the fucking thing, you know. But Steve hates the Apple Too, and he also now hates the Lisa. In the book Infinite Loop, Malone writes quote, Steve Jobs no longer cared about the two. He publicly derided it, saying the two group was the doll and boring division, that it had shitty ideas, and calling its engineers Clydesdale's because they were little more than dull draft horses.
Even worse. Jobs undermine sales by broadly hinting to the world that once the MAC arrived on the scene, the two would be obsolete. So he looks at this cash cow that's still making them a fortune and is like, hey, everybody, you're gonna want to stop buying this thing in a while. This new thing coming up. These guys are all drug addicts.
An idiot is morns.
It is so. It is so that guy that like everything you have is built on the back of this computer. Steve don't treat it like and he and he and Wosniak are gonna have like a conflict because at the Apple two keeps getting left out at like these big corporate events. He'll do when he'll talk to about the other teams, and the Wosneak's like it makes all of
our money, as he should. Yeah, and the evening is not just jobs too, because I think Wosney is gonna leave over this in part, and like there are other like it's the Jobs is not the only guy at the company who has like I can't wait for the next thing, not the thing that works brain right to the extent that they damage the company. Right, obviously, you
always got to be looking for the next thing. But to like jettison your cash cow over it is just so Again it's evidence against like the idea that he was always this like flawless business.
Mind you exactly the thing to put his money in that you a safe bat.
No and a big non yeah. A big part of like why he does the things he does later is he causes a lot of failures through his arrogance. He does learn from some of them, which again maybe makes him puts a step beyond a number of these other guys, but like, these are some pretty major mistakes. And Job also continues to be fucking impossible to work with due to his personal quirks, which put an unreasonable burden on everyone around him. From Isaacson's book quote, there was also
the issue of his hygiene. He was still convinced against all evidence, that his vegan diets meant he didn't need to use deodorant or take regular showers. We would have to literally put him out the door and tell him to go take a shower, said Markola. At meetings we had to look at his dirty feet. Sometimes to relieve stress, he would soak his feet in the toilet, a practice that was not as soothing for his colleagues.
What and where I'm back to like a logistically, Some logistically is he's staying on top of it with his fate in that h I think he's standing.
He gets a shoe off and puts his foot in the toilet. I don't know Spender does in one of the movies. No, I think he would just dip it. But I am basically off of Hollywood magic, because you can get this day, you could get. I will say the more I don't know. You know, I actually go back and forth because I wanted to say. It'd be one thing if he like had built a fancy like spa footpath and just held meetings there. But you know what,
I don't think that's good. That's bougie, Sophie. This is respectable. Sticking your foot in the toilet or using a twenty dollars Amazon and trying to hide it on a recording from Sophie.
Both of those things.
I'm just saying Steve and I are Mavericks baby that just happened. Yeah, I'm gonna play that Jeep Renegade commercial again and rock out. Wow.
Yeah, I think we broke and close fucking free. I'm sorry he's still dealing with that, but he's so rich as well.
You don't have to use a toilet as a footback steak.
There's a sink. There's a sink in the same room.
Yeah, I guess, I guess where I've come around to is. I think that part's funny. Oh, it's very funny. It's a nice break from mentally abusing a child.
You wouldn't think it's funny. Foot massage podcast.
Or Yeah, I'm gonna get a massage chair Sophie and I'm gonna start one of those as MR podcasts where it's just the sound of the massage chair as I get a massage. We're gonna make twelve million in the toilet?
Yeah, yeah, what's that? Dan will just quit?
Sorry. So The Lisa debuts to pretty disappointing sales about a year before The MAC is scheduled to have its release, and we'll Jobs threw himself into this project. He remained only an occasional presence in the life of his daughter. She recalls being utterly bold over when her mother told her Jobs had launched a computer project named the Lisa. She saw this as proof that her dad really loved her. Now,
Steve could not admit that he loved his daughter. He's back in her life at this point, but that would have been like, that would have been like acknowledging she was his and that she deserved a place in his heart, and that is just not a thing he was ready to do at that point. So whenever she'd ask him, he'd be like, no, sorry, it's not named after you. Just a coincidence. I named a computer after my daughter. Has nothing to do with you. Sorry, get big Simpson's head. Yeah.
And several times when he's asked at like he'll like take her his daughter to a party. When he starts acknowledging her more, He'll go to an event and people will ask him like, oh, that's Lisa. Is that who you name the computer after? And he'd be like, fuck, no,
absolutely not in front of this little girl. Regis McKenna, who's an Apple employee, who works on the Lisa project in the early days when Jobs is in charge of it, tells Isaacson, we had to come up with an acronym so that we could claim it was not named after Lisa the child, and the eventual acronym they pick for
Lisa was Local Integrated Systems Architecture. This does not mean anything, like this guy is like not only is he like lying to his daughter and his friends, but like he made us come up with an acronym for Lisa demeans.
So that he was so dedicated to his kid.
Yeah, he has a team of men to help him not be there for his kids.
He's diverting company resources to help otaize his child.
It's it's pretty funny. I mean, it would be devastating to be that kid, but it's pretty funny now, I guess or not. One of the two engineers on the project would joke that Lisa stood for Lisa invented stupid acronym, which is also a bad acronym because you're not supposed to have the name of the acronym in the acronym. But beggars can't be choosers here, right, Like.
Shut the fuck up toilet feet, like.
Stinky toilet free.
Such a shitty thing to do. And we're gonna get to the conclusion of this story, which, to everyone's surprise, includes, well it includes Bono, but we're building to that. So what became the Macintosh had started? Bono? Yeah, Bono's Bono's gonna be in play later, Sophie.
Does this have to do with when they say not another acronym?
No better off? Not around around? I could make it work, might agree.
I'm mad when they violated all our phones by putting that You two album on them without our consent?
Does it have to do with that?
It's so funny.
I do think it would now be really funny if some like powerful hacking group started putting copies of a YouTube album in people's hard drives, Like if that was just this mystery for a while, everyone woke up with it and they all blame Apple. How did you get this on my PC? You souns of bitches? I don't know. Maybe maybe listen in Russia. That's how you can really fuck with us through a U two CD on the on the do od's hard drive.
You're in rare form today.
It's thank you, It's great.
I'm really feeling. I'm feeling the power of the spirit moves through the spirit of jobs. I also have only nineteen minutes left on my memory cards. So we are in gonna be a gonna be a baller baller run through the rest of this episode here. So, the Macintosh had started as the project of this former professor named Jeff Raskin. Jeff wanted to create a computer for the masses, and he saw it as like an appliance, like you'd
buy like any other appliance. Right, some mom would go down to a store and just like you'd pick up a fucking what is an appliance, sophie What.
Is an appliant you're talking about?
I have too miserable hammer and a gun, right, that's all I need.
A dishwasher, a dishwasher.
It's like buying a dishwasher. That's what they want the Macintosh to be, right. And the downside of this idea is that, like, you can't make a sexy computer that's like a dishwasher, right, because dishwashers are inherently not very s not really, Sophiella, you can't make a dishwasher be sexy, right. And Raskin's idea, which I think is probably, I mean, obviously it's good. It's what all computing winds up being based around.
As somebody who likes things clean.
Disagree, Sure, Sophie, to just break your dishes when you're done with them. So Raskin is like, I think we should have like a cheap, accessible machine anyone can use, and Jobs is like, sure, but I want to throw all this sexy bullshit in there. So he forces Raskin out. And one of the harms this is going to do for Apple is Raskin had been like one of Apple's better engineers, and he like pushes him out in order to steal the Macintosh project and then like fuck it up.
So that's really cool. Raskin's vision of what customers wanted in a computer had been pretty astute, and Jobs mostly rejected it. Right, He's going to understand elements of this in the future, but he has a different idea about like what he wants from this, and a lot of it's based on this visit he takes to the labs of Xerox, who have invested in Apple. Xerox engineers had built the first graphical operating system, right, it has the
first what's called like a graphical user interface. That's what everything has. We just call it a UY today, right, because it's just the only way shit works pretty much. But back then, it's like the Xerox skunk Works project and Jobs falls in love with it and steals a lot of it for what becomes the Mac. Hey, everyone, Robert here, the Lisa was actually the first mass market
computer with a graphical user interface. Obviously, it's a little muddled because Jobs is on the Lisa and then he hops over halfway onto the Mac, which is also an early guy computer. I just wouldn't make that clear. It's also worth noting that, like Bill Gates sees basically the same demo, and like they also take a lot from Xerox in order to make what becomes Windows. Everybody's kind er. Yeah,
everywhere everyone copied Xerox. Yeah, that is funny. It's really funny because it seems to be universally agreed that, like, you could be pissed off at Bill and Steve for this, but Xerox like absolutely, like fiercely rejected the idea that they should do anything new or exciting, Like they had this brilliant idea that defined the future of computing and We're like, we are absolutely never going to funny people
never stop making copies. So Jobs, it is funny though that Jobs is like livid at Gates for stealing from Xerox, even though like it's like it's like being angry at a bank robber who steals from the same bank, Like you said, up a bit, I robbed them. Yeah. So Jobs is very excited about what he thinks the mac is going to mean for the future of computing. And as he's like stacking all these new requirements on and it makes the processor balloon. That makes it basically it
like triples in price. Effectively, it turns into a premium machine. And some people are like, hey, maybe this is going to be too expensive to sell a lot of these things. The Apple too is like a common man's computer, and what you're building is not. He kind of would like paper over that with these like lavishing praise to the Macintosh team about like you guys are building the future,
that we're the only force that can stop IBM. If IBM takes over the personal computer market totally, you know that it's going to like clamp down on all of mankind's future. It's going to be a boot on the human face, like you guys are freedom fighters making like what becomes a twenty six hundred dollars machine something like that, which is an insane that's like not cheap now, it's
like an insane amount of money at the time. And obviously Jobs is also governing Apple in his heartless and brutal a fashion, as like anyone at IBM does anything. But he's good at selling this vision to the team, right, He's even good at selling it to like some cutthroat businessman who should have known better. And this is where we get jobs at his cult leaderist, right, this is
where we really see his quality. It's not going to work out as well now as it will in the future, but his ability to people call it a reality distortion field because he was legitimately around for the creation of some great products that actually changed the world. But like when anyone else does this, we just call them a cult leader, Like, yeah, this man came in and sold people a fanciful view of reality in order to get
stuff out of them. Well, that's a cult leader or a con man, right, same diff up to a certain point, right, And the best vision we get of how this process occurred, how Jobs would kind of enrapture somebody in his personal vision of himself in the future is the story of John Scully. John is going to become the CEO of Apple. He's head hunted at Steve Jobs's request. Jobs wanted a and one of the reasons why Jobs goes after Scully Scully is a marketer, right, he is the most famous
marketer of his day. He had come up through Pepsi and he had gotten like this job. He basically been put in charge of like sales in the in what becomes the EU, I think at this point, and he completely revitalizes the business. Right. Pepsi is like barely exists in Europe, and he makes it popular there. Right, he increases, He turns them from a vision that's losing a bunch of money to the one that's making a bunch of money. And because of this he gets like he basically becomes
chief marketer of the entire company. And he launches this thing called the Pepsi Challenge. Some like the old people in the audience are like screaming, now it's a pervert strinth that tastes terrible. It is a pervert strink, which is why I love it. I'm a doctor pepper Man. Legally I have to be you. I like PEPSI. I don't hate pepsi, Sophie. I like all poison. I f I said, Look, I support other people doing methamphetamine too,
you know, I don't. I don't. You know, I don't have a problem with anything cigarettes, you know, Rick and I. And that's all good. Baby turpentine. Sure, why not drink some turpentine. It's all a substance. Putting substances inside you and see what happens.
You know.
That's that's my advice to the listener Personally, I think you should get back to the script before you're before you're at dcartist full Robert, Oh, yeah, we're we are at twelve minutes forty four seconds. Maybe Daniel can throw in like the twenty four ticking, you know, from that.
Show John Scully.
So this guy John Scully comes up with a pepsi challenge and it causes like the soda wars are this thing. People don't really talk about it now, but like this was like the big corporate conflict of its day, and this led to like Pepsi's largest continued period of like dominance over Coca Cola or at least relative to like the way things had been. And this is why Jobs wants Scully right. For one thing, he looks at IBM and Coca Cola as very similar and he wants to
dethrone IBM, which is the giant in his space. And he sees Apple is a lot like Pepsi, right, which says a lot again about that kind of like rebel image he's trying to craft for Apple computers that like, well, at the end of the day, you're not like some rebel alliance, you're Pepsi, right, You're literally Pepsi. You even brought the Pepsi guy in. But he also wants Scully in there because Jobs think soon he'll be ready to be the CEO, but he knows he's still not ready yet.
It's this weird little bit of like humility you get from him, and he's like, I want a marketer because I think I have more to learn from my marketer, right.
And one of the things this says is that like Jobs is for all that he pretends to be this like enlightened creative thinker, He is a guy who identifies with the marketers and the finance dudes and a lot of these like, but in terms of like what they're actually doing, these are the people that he is a lot more like when it comes to his actual behavior, right. And it's also him being very conventional because this period.
A big thing that's happening to a lot of American corporations in this period, like kind of the fad of the day is marketers are being put in charge of a lot of these massive companies because there's this increasing belief that is the CEO is basically the chief salesman, right, and pulling for Scully is jobs really buying into that very conventional wisdom to a substantial extent. And it's a
terrible misjudgment. These are not the same industries, right. The idea that you'd be like, well, coke and Pepsi, that's like IBM and Apple. It doesn't really work because coke and Pepsi were both very old companies, right, and from the time that like soda became a universally consumed beverage in American culture, the industry didn't shift. Right. If it moved one percent in cocer Pepsi's favor, that's a huge
deal at the time. It's also very different from computers because it's easy to sell people a so you can buy a soda for pocket change. You can't purchase a two or twenty five hundred dollars Macintosh computer on a whim. Right, they're not the same kinds of like ass.
And that was probably worth much more in the day, right.
Yes, yes, a lot more. And it's also like most clients are still corporate clients, So you're not just saying, like, hey, why don't you try a pepsi today at lunch instead of a coke? That's easy. You're saying, hey, why don't you consend her spending millions of dollars to completely replace your company's IT infrastructure with Apple? Right, they're very different asks, right, But Jobs had sold himself on Scully and he wouldn't take no for an answer. And Scully himself is not
sure he wants to do this. He's like, I don't know tech, why am I getting?
You know?
Why would I take this risk? And Jobs just keeps he love bombs him.
Right.
Not only is he calling constantly, he like flies to New York pretending to look for a real estate so he can like spend more time with the guy. He's like, hey, can you give me some advice buying an apartment. Yeah, it could be in a different man. And I'm going to quote from the book Infinite Loop here. It was a Sunday afternoon, so the visit began at Scully's exquisite modern home in Greenwich. Jobs toured the ground, met Leezy Scully, which I guess is his wife, and the pair retired
to the library to talk. Why are you talking to me, Scully asked, why don't you go talk to somebody at IBM or Culett Packard. Why do you want somebody out of the soft drink at drink industry. I don't know anything about computers. A lot of people would ask the same question in the years to come. In reply, Jobs said, what we're doing is never been done before. We're trying to build a totally different kind of company, and we need really great people. My dream is that every person
in the world will have their own Apple computer. To do that, we've got to be a great marketing company. And it's this does show you a little bit of the reality of distortion effect. Maybe that washed over you, maybe it didn't, But he starts that by saying we're going to be a completely different company, and the end thought is by hiring a Marketer as our CEO, like everyone.
Else, the thing that everyone is doing.
Yeah, think that everybody's doing different. Yeah, but I think it works on a guy like Scully, Right, it's going to work on somebody who's maybe a little bit on the way to being a narcissist like you often have to be to succeed at that level in business. And Jobs is telling him what he wants to hear, whateveryone wants to hear, which is, you can change the world for the better by doing exactly what you're doing right now. Right,
That's what everybody wants, and Jobs knows that. Right. It's why people can be convinced that like just tweeting anger at some dude or a lady or whoever is going to like fix a major social problem.
Right.
It's the same impult. Like any cult leader understands why humans are motivated by the things they are, we all secretly want that, right. You have to fight against this constantly if you do want to like be a better person. There's always this desire to believe that however I'm being is at least the best I can be. Right, and Jobs not just understands that fundamental fact, but he understands how to use that fact to create a script that is going to take this guy, and it absolutely works.
Scully is charmed with Steve Jobs, bordering on obsessed. His wife, however, doesn't buy this shtick. When he asked her what she thought of him, her handswer was basically, I don't know, bro, Like, yeah, stinky goblin. Yeah, listen to your wives about the sinky goblin who tries to get you to take a job. Folks, if you're ever in this situation, jobs, we are jobs. Yeah. So back at Apple, Jobs's employees and colleagues are equally
unimpressed with Scully, who was boring and uncharismatic. But Jobs forced the marriage into being, and he even convinced Scully to take a forty percent pay cut to do it. Part of how he did this was by leaning on his star power, and this is from Infinite Loop again. They met on another Sunday. They had lunch and then went for a walk in Central Park. Scully would later remember how chagrined he was by all the people recognizing Jobs. It was hardly the anonymous meeting Scully had hoped for.
I want you to come and work with me, said, Jobs, I can learn so much from you. They walked through the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As they walked, Schooly began to imagine himself as the teacher of a brilliant student, an Aristotle say to Alexander. He confessed that if he hadn't been a businessman, he would have probably become an artist Jobs and a remarkable coincidence, said that if he hadn't become a technologist, he would have been a poet in Paris.
Oh fuck, these people are stupid as hell.
I do this is where and again none of the Jobs movies show this guy. They all want to show him like wooing crowds or like being you know, a technic. None of them seemed to want to show him like being a cult leader manipulating rich people to like do whatever he wants them to do, like getting it. He finds with each of these guys, he finds out like what do you want? And he finds a way to pride. He does the same thing, by the way, and it's not funny when he does it to Was. But he
does this to Was. What does Wasniak want? He wants to have an adventure with his best friend. So that's how Jobs frames it. What a Scully want to change the world by selling pepsi, right, and that's what he gives.
Him, you know, by selling a computer.
Uh yeah, yeah, exactly, the pepsi of computers. So Jobs eventually, like Scully, it goes kind of back and forth, and it kind of it does culminate. You could film this really well because there's this like dramatic confrontation on top of a skyscraper they have and Jobs puts it all on the line and is like, do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugar water or do you want a chance to change the world? And
that breaks Scully's will. He takes the job. The Mac launch was coming up in January of nineteen eighty four. After the failure of the Lisa. The company desperately needed some hype to carry it through. Right. The Apple two was still selling strong, but it's starting to reach kind of like it's starting to fall off, right. They can see that, and they really do need something new. Now, Steve throws all of his hopes and all of the hopes of his company behind a new ad, this kind
of groundbreaking new strategy for advertising Apple products. Based on some ideas that had been brought to them, the ad from chaiat Day. They had written this ad. This is the famous nineteen eighty four ad right where you've got like these lines of people all up in front of this screen where this like big brother, you know figure is like preaching, you know, reading a bunch of like political ideology tracks to them basically, and then this this woman in athletic shorts with a mall runs up and
she throws the hammer through the screen. It's like, yeah, the computer is going to stop nineteen eighty four.
Bro.
It's the kind of hilarious that like, looking back at that, it is it is, I mean, because it was mocked by like the Pepsi guy and this thinking you know.
Yeah, the pepsi guy and the smelly weirdo. Yeah. So the nineteen eighty four ad had actually been written before chaiat Day contracted with Apple, but and this is what's funny to be, they brought it to a bunch of other companies because they were just trying to sell this idea to anybody who wouldn't want to be nineteen eighty
four is coming up. Someone's going to have the nineteen eighty four ad, and they also understand every company wants to feel like they're the little guy, or at least wants to make themselves look like the little guy fighting back. You know. It's like how all these giant car companies are like, you're just a humble rancher, like, and we're just a humble tool provider for a humble rancher and
also worth the GDP of Japan or whatever. But yeah, so this ad that they try to sell to everybody like keeps getting turned down because it's it's like kind of narcissistic and up its own asshole. So as soon as job sees it, he's like, yes, we have this is the best idea, bring it on. So they like they they they filmed this thing. My favorite side detail is that they have to bring it a bunch of skinheads as extras. Right now, I don't know are these
because there's different kinds of skinheads. But I also feel like the skinheads who are you're can most easily get in an Apple commercial might not be the good kind. I don't know.
Yeah, yeah, Trouble said, it's it's a huge hit with the fans, and I want to have I want to have Sophie, play you a clip of like from the end of this ad when it's I think this is at Macworld when they play it for the first time, because I want you to hear the audience here.
Right on January twenty four, Apple Computer will introduce MacIntire and you'll see why nineteen eighty four w the nineteen eighty four.
This ads like a huge hit with the listeners, but Apple's executives are are kind of like furious about this, right, Like when they see the ad for the first time, they're all they all have the reaction of all the people who turned it down. They're like, what the fuck is this thing? Why are we trying to use this like dark bleak apocalyptic ad sell Computers cancel a bunch of our ad spots, and Scully has to tell chaiat Day to sell off their Super Bowl airtime, and Jay
chaiat where at the company like basically fights back. They had they had bought like a sixty second and a thirty second slot, and Chai it sells the thirty second slot, but then he's like, it's too late for us to sell the longer ones. We might as well just run the ad, right, And this it's interesting. I don't know how you want to like qualify the level of success or failure this ad has. Right, it's it's seen as one of the greatest ads of all time. It is remembered, right,
it doesn't really sell any macs, So that is a problem. Yeah, that is a problem. Like is it successful because it's really well known and famous and parodied a bunch or because like some snooty ad people think it was great, or should you judge it based on like how it sells? And the mac is not an immediate hit some of why the Macintosh was kind of seen as a disaster. It's not super fair because it does like make money. They sell a couple hundred thousand in the first year,
which is good. It's like a decent product line. But Jobs had expected to two million sales, and in fact, like when he comes up with, like, we're gonna sell two million of these in our first year, it gets cut down to one million by the company, who's like, that's an insane thing to tell shareholders that we're expecting to sell. No one's ever sold anything close to that many computers in a year. We certainly aren't with this
fucking thing. And that is still that the estimate the company comes up with a million is still like more than four times as many as actually sell. So this is if if Jobs hadn't run his mouth, hadn't started lying that this is going to sell like a million or two million units, he could have just said, yeah, we launched the Mac and it's making us a bunch of money. Great, But for one thing, he's gotten everyone to expect a million sales and they don't make that.
And for another thing, Apple has stocked up on a bunch of materials they don't wind up actually needing because of how many more of these they expect to sell. So that's a real issue, and it makes the Mac kind of come out looking like it was a bomb. Steve bears a lot of the fault for this. Part of why the back doesn't sell better is that he had insisted that it not be compatible with IBM. Right.
Not only that, he's like, I don't want this to be compatible with IBMS or with the Lisa right, this other computer will making fuck it like my computers won't talk to it.
Once again, severing the connection with Lisa.
Yeah, he really is such a predictable man. This whole ideology had infected a lot of Apple at this point. Because Steve hates the rest of the company, he kinds of builds this situation where every team is really siloed from the other teams. You've got the Apple two, the Apple three, the Lisa, and the Mac teams, and like they avoid talking or communicating. They all have their separate marketing and accounting firms, which is like it's wasting a ton of money. So Scully gets in right before the
nineteen eighty four AD. He's there for these kind of disappointing MAC sales and Jobs' reality distortion field starts to fail right and Scully is like, well, we need to make some changes. I don't care if how Steve wants it. So he integrates all of these teams so we can eliminate a bunch of these redundant positions. And this infuriates Jobs because like now the Mac team has to like share resources with other teams, and he thinks that that's vile.
Scully also makes himself head of the Apple two team, which Jobs hates because he's like he hates the Apple too, and Scully doesn't know enough to be the head of the Apple two team. But this does at least show that he what he's trying to do, I think is just kind of signal to Wozniak and the others, like, hey, the Apple too is important to us, the thing that
makes all our money. The other bad call that Jobs had made around this time is that he was obsessed with something called the Twiggy drive, which is Jobs thinks
floppy discs aren't the right technology. He's like, I've got we've got this bespoke replacement for the floppy disc called the Twiggy drive, and this is going to be the future of memory, and it they never get it working very well, right, Like, He's part of why the MA gets delayed is he's obsessed with it having a Twiggy drive and that has to be working rather than like just putting it a disc drive using everyone uses yeah, yeah, yeah,
and yeah. I want to quote from Infinite Loop here because it really gets to like one of Jobs is more significant technical fuck ups. Jobs in fact, had been partly responsible for the problems with Twiggy. His rule, laid down for esthetic reasons that Apple computers have not have noisy cooling. Fans had made the creation of Twiggy nearly impossible from the outset. Disk drives with their electric motors, spinning platters and moving armatures produce a lot of heat
in the uncol heart of an Apple computer. A high speed advance drive like a twiggy simply cooked, burning out its own chips and melting or distorting the mylar diskette. He's so angry about the concept of a fan that he he shackles this thing to a melting a twiggy drive. It's very funny, everyone, Robert here, Just to be very clear, the mac does not launch with a twiggy drive because they don't get that working. It launches with the flobby.
And actually it's only able to launch with the flabby because they decide, like near the end, that they just can't make it work. Thankfully, somebody on the team has sort of secretly against jobs his orders worked on a way to fit in a floppy drive with a Macintosh, and so the day has saved no thanks to Steve Jobs. But I just want to make that clear as well.
He was so bad at this.
Yeah, he really is at this point, so bad at his job. That's important to understand is most of his skill up to this point, most of his impact has been in his ability to like manipulate money people and marketing people, and he is to an extent good at marketing, but he's like wrong about every technical call he makes at this point in his.
Life, seemingly every business decision too, Yeah, a.
Lot of them.
Now. Not long after this, Jobs would also intervene to kill like the kind of the last Apple two the two X, which would have had that we're going to have both a more powerful processor in it and also a second slot for another processor where you could plug in an IBM chip, which would have made Apple products IBM compatible for the first time. And Job Jobs like personally he goes out of its way to strangle this thing, and it's crazy, this thing must do less. Yeah yeah.
So Jobs also ensured that the Apple two team was cut out of any credit or praise during the annual Apple media events he headlined and again had This helps to kind of push Wosniak to quit the company, and you can see why, Like, you know, the WAZ comes back and he gets right into Apple two stuff, and he's kind of frustrated by how everyone else seems to
treat them like shit, except for Skully. It's not a coincidence that he does this that he kind of like bails on the company about a decade after Steve Jobs stole that money from the Atari Job because while Jobs doesn't like the Apple too and won't say anything nice about him, but he knows Wosniak is a star, so he pulls him out of Apple two work for a while to do press for the Mac, and Wosniak, being
a good company man, does it. And while he's on this media tour traveling around to like talk up Jobs as Mac, he reads the first book about Apple and reads this story about Jobs stealing five or seven thousand dollars from him, and he like weeps openly about it, like this is I think part of why he makes the decision to leave. Things keep getting worse for Apple
from this point forward. The nineteen eighty four commercial had not moved a lot of max, but its critical success had convinced Jobs to do whatever the Chayat Day people said. And they follow up the nineteen eighty four commercial with the Lemmings commercial, which shows, like IBM customers, this Lemmings marching suicidally off a cliff Like it's both kind of disturbing and also like really pisses people off.
Hey, you fucking idiot, buy my diure or you'll die.
And by this point sales have become dire enough, and like he gets in trouble.
For this time, the game Lemmings came out as well.
I think it would have predated that that was.
Not the eighties.
Let me yeah nice, my bad, my bad.
Yeah yeah yeah, this is kind of the mid eighties. And like right after that, he comes out at like the Macworld event and he proposes a detent with IBM. So it's this weird mix of like shit talking the company, calling them the Evil Empire, and then suddenly coming out on stage and being like, hey, we actually want to work with you guys, when like none of your shit sells as well as you thought it would and this is all messy, right, this is hard to clean up.
It's bad for the stock price. And Scully's job evolves into an even mix of like cleaning up Jobs as messes and like apologizing for him and trying to occasionally chart a path forward for the company. He is bad at both of these tasks, and he and Jobs eventually wind up in a conflict over control of the board when Jobs tries to engineer a coup On the day Scully is heading overseas to celebrate a major sale. Somebody
warns Scully and he shows it. He and Jobs like fight it out in front of the board basically, and Scully wins Jobs resigns from Apple. He is devastated by this, but the one consequence of this failure is that he starts spending time around his daughter and Chrisan. Again, the way Lisa describes it, he seems to have lint on them to the extent that he lint on anybody once his world fell apart. But Jobs wasn't going to be a failure for long, and this is where we get
to what actually made the man special. Throughout the early part of this story, I've hit on a couple of decisions that Jobs made that were wrong in the moment but right in the long term. He wanted to fight Wohsneyak on expansion slots for the Apple too, which is dumb then, but in the long term that is where technology trended, and trended there because of Jobs, but he was able to sell it to people right, and his desire for closed independent ecosystems that customers couldn't meddle with
is super profitable. Like, look at the iPod, look at the iPad, look at the iPhone. All of them work that way, and a lot of other companies have gone in that direction. Likewise, his early flirtation with Touch Greens, he correctly anticipated the future there, right. He has sometimes a good eye for it, right, And so after he has this kind of humbling experience of being forced out an Apple, his next few years he's going to make
some really good bets throughout the nineties. He establishes this new computer company Next, which, if you're looking to spell it, it's spelled the way an asshole would spell it. Just the X is capitalized. I think it's infuriating. And the Next seems like a dumb computer on paper. They cost like twelve grand each, and he means them for the education market, right, like, it's this the most cost It's kind of if you take him at face value, it's
an insane thing to try to do. The case is also a perfect cube for whatever reason, nobody, which like nobody wants right.
Nobody's buying case. It looks like an old safe.
Yeah. They eventually repurposed that design for the Xbox uhuh so, But again this is not like this seems like a bad idea. But Apple buys Next because they like what he's doing with the operating to how it looks so much. They're so enthralled with like the vision he presents. He cons these guys one more time, and that's how he gets back in an Apple right. A few years later, by like ninety seven, they buy Next and they bring
jobs back in to run the company. He also, during this kind of like most of the nineties interregnum period of his life or whatever, he founds Pixar, which you know is Pixar. It works out pretty well, so he does. This is kind of the start of the job's comeback story. And one thing you have to give the man is that both of these are evidence that he has more
personal growth than a lot of guys in his position. Right, And in the similar manner, he makes some strides in improving his relationship with his daughter over this period of time. He also provides more support to Chrisanne. He eventually like buys her a house. And I think Mona Simpson is the large It seems like Mona kind of comes into his life and sees how he's treating Lisa and Chris Anne as like, man, you Steve Jobs, buy your fucking house,
buy your kids to new clothes. What the fuck are you doing, Steve, stop this like you're being a dick for no reason. Yeah, and he actually listens to her, right, which you know, I guess you maybe says something that said he is still Steve Jobs. And I am never going to say in this period that he has a great dad and he's always weirdly agro about his daughter, like wanting anything from him, any kind of acknowledgment or
anything else. One moment she relates in her book is that like when she's like, I think twelve or something, He's driving her around in his brand new Porsche, right, and she asks him like a little like a kid would, Hey, when you're done with the Porsche, can I have it right? Which I think I don't know many twelve year olds who wouldn't want their dad's Porsche if they can't have it.
Right, especially when that that is filthy rich.
Yeah, and they grew up poor right there. These memories are on well anything any Steve Jobs.
This is directly as a result of Steve Jobs.
She grew up Paul. Yeah, yeah, This could be if she's like thirty asking this question. This could be like, you know, part of a character trait in a movie that like, yeah, this is somebody who's like grown up, you know, greedy or whatever. But she's a child, right, this is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Here's how he responds. Before I made a move to get out, he turned to face me. You're not getting anything, he said,
you understand nothing. You're getting nothing. And she's like, I didn't know if he meant the car, and and haarent it's like you're not getting any acknowledgment at all from me. That like, I mean, like you're getting nothing from me. Period. What a devastating thing to tell a little kid get out, like a twelve year old at this point, Yeah, like
a twelve year old. It's one thing to say, Like a reasonable thing to say is like, eh, you know, if you need a car, you'll get like a nice normal like a used car, something that works and is safe. But like, I'm not giving a child a Porsche. Very reasonable thing to say. That's real fucked up. Now. Throughout this whole period in the late nineties, he slowly gets better at kind of embracing her but it's always this period of like he'll let her in and then he'll
recoil and say something really cruel. And one of the things in like the dark moments in this relationship they have, which are many, that Lisa comforts herself with, is the knowledge that he had named the Lisa after her. Right, she never believes him. She's just waiting for him to say, like, yes, it was named after.
You, Yeah, which would cost him nothing.
And it would cost him literally nothing. And this is what she writes about it. I like the idea that I was connected to him in this way. Me and I'd been chosen and had a place, despite the fact that he was aloof or absent, and meant I was fascina to the earth and its machines. He was famous, he drove a Porsche. If the Lisa was named after me, I was a part of all that. I see now. We were at cross purposes for him. I was a
blot on a spectacular ascent. As our story did not fit with the narrative of greatness and virtue he might have wanted for himself. My existence ruined his streak. For me, it was the opposite, the closer I was to him the less I would feel ashamed he was part of the world. He would accelerate me into the light, stating thing to think.
Darkness this man has put inside. Even then, she was still desperate by him.
Jesus dead or he's her dead. Yeah, you don't.
Choose your parents.
No, oh God. So for years, even after he did accept her as his daughter and brought her into his life, Steve would continue to refuse acknowledging that he'd named the Lisa after her. Eventually, when she's like a young adult, I think he finally breaks down. I think she might have been like late teens. But this is only when she's put in a situation in which denying that the Lisa was named after his daughter would have made him look bad in front of his most famous friend. And
this is where Bono comes back into the store. Yes, yay. So the following anecdote happens. Jobs goes on this like yacht trip around the Mediterranean with like his new family. He's like married again, he's got another kid and with Lisa. He invites Lisa this is part of him like doing a rapproch mall with her, and they stop off at Bono's villa on like the Mediterranean Coast for dinner, and Bono, who's kind of starstruck by Steve Job, starts asking about
the early days of Apple. Then Bono asked, so was the Lisa computer named after her? And Bona's she's doing this casually, right, He's not up on this lore. He like knows Steve had a computer named the Lisa. He meets Lisa, He's like, oh, he's named after her, right, And my father hesitated, looks down at his plate for a long moment, then back at Bono. Yeah it was, he said. I sat up in my chair. I thought so. Bono said, yep, my father said. I studied my father's face.
What it changed? Why had he admitted it now, after all these years? Of course it was named after me? I thought, Then his life seemed preposterous. Now I felt a new power that pulled my chest up. That's the first time he said yes. I told Bono, thank you for asking. It was as if famous people needed other famous people around to release their secrets.
Oh God, this poor woman has had her life ruined. She just randomly says one of hers og style things because Steve Jobs blotted her soul.
Now she's the first person because she does inherit millions of dollars from him, and she's the first person I've ever heard of inheriting millions of dollars where I'm like, yeah, but you earned that, Like.
Yeah, Like she should have there, she should have gone billions. She should not have Oh my god, fuck out Bono.
That's the he's the good guy. He's not the bad guy.
Something to make up for putting that album on.
It's the first great thing he did. The second thing was the Spider Man musical.
The second was he Oh right, I'll give him. There was one other great thing I got bought a.
Paid bono podcast.
Intel Nochio flew me out to Dublin. Wants to report on this operating system they were making called Migo. That was like that was going to be their android. You haven't heard of Migo because it was a flop, and they're like they flew us all out there and like it took us to the Guinness Brewery where there was a Bono impersonator and a whole fake He was billed as the best Bono impersonator in Ireland. Wow, which is
maybe a crowded field. I actually don't know. I will say I could not have told you it wasn't real Bono. You know, he did look the part, and it's you know, I'll give him that. I'll give him that.
Plays an impersonator though.
Yeah, maybe it was. That's his hobby. He's both getting rich people to reveal their secrets pretending to be a Bono impersonator. God Willing. All right, well ed? Is there any where people can find you?
You can find me at exit Ron on Twitter, slash rate, my newstop bezziest Guy dot Social fun me of course, and my new podcast, Better Offline at better Offline dot com. Click the podcast button you get all the stuff on there and my newsletters on there too.
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