Behind the Bastards - Part Three: The Terrible Secret of Steve Jobs

Episode Date: March 12, 2024

Robert and Ed reach a crucial crux in the Steve Jobs story: his years of failed product launches and near destruction of Apple. Also, Bono appears.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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John Stuart and the best news team for today's biggest headlines, exclusive extended interviews and more. Now this is the second term we can all get behind. Listen to the Daily Show, Ears Edition on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Anderson was found on the streets of the Inland Empire about to get on the freeway covered in ticks and sleighs. And now she dresses nicer than everyone I know. Yeah, she does. She dresses nicer than me.

I'm Robert Evans, a host of the podcast that Sophie is trying to ruin by attacking my sense of fashion. You know who sense of fashion is unimpeachable? Anderson, our guest today, Ed Zitron. Oh, yeah. They love me. they love me and they love my fashion, they love how I talk. Yeah, yeah. You're 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. Like a remark almost deliberately, but it's unclear whether he was just an asshole, an

idiot or 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 ghouls 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 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 punk weirdo,

like a gross man who's like, yeah, I just don't give a shit. The fact that Steve always has to 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 better hygiene than Steve Jobs.

Easily, well, Steve Jobs really has bad hygiene now because he's dead. Wow. Thank you, Ed, for that really fun fact. Fun fact, Steve Jobs died. If he were just coming in and being like, look, man, I woke up at an hour before this meeting. I haven't bathed in four days because I have been doing nothing but 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 bastard, Sam Bankman Fried though. I do kind of respect that he'd go on meetings with like Sequoia Capital or whoever and just play League of Legends in the background like I just can I go 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'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, 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 League of Legends because my giant brain needs the distraction to focus is kind of like the modern, it's doing the ADHD with Steve Jobs did the Eastern mysticism, right? Where he like built this aura around himself as 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 it explodes. And also 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 Sandbankman-free. We've done a lot of Sandbankman-free. I haven't done a dedicated one on the Effective Altruist, 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 will not grow up in the internet using something awful hate 4chan, 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 4chan, but I think 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 no. 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 he could go either way. 50 50. 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 in, you know, after he's come back to Apple iTunes. Yeah. 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 important to reiterate because that's a 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.

But we can talk about like carbon and like, well, if you're like hunting or whatever meat, is that lower carbon costs or picking up roadkill? That's all outside of it. But most people can agree like, yeah, it's reasonable to think that our attitudes towards red meat is a culture's fucking nuts, right? Maybe this was the thing that Steve was right about

because there is a lot of horrible stuff that goes on in 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 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 these weird pseudo scientific beliefs he has about health and diet. And this is akin to a religion for him, which is why he got really angry when people would like try to make him shower, 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 vegetarian or vegan, who like if a friend, you know, or a family member, they were with ordered meat, they could get kind of like snippy at that person. I don't think I've ever met someone who is vegetarian

or 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 go skating and the like, but they did gradually over time 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 Elon Musk, right? 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. 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-interred 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 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 Cathy, Chris Ann'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, this, everything that's happening. This is how he's doing this to like a first or a second grade girl. So when he meets Sarah, it's during this family dinner. He's having with Chrisanne and Lisa in Stanford. And Lisa describes that as soon as she like 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 your dad Yeah, yeah So it comes time to order dinner and Chris and and Lisa both avoid any red meter poultry because they know Steve right? They know that if we order red meter if we order poultry, he'll get like shittiest Right, so they order like fish or something because I think he does eat fish. But Sarah, who doesn't know Steve at all,

the seven years, so this very young girl orders a hamburger, 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. Yeah that is the template abuse. Yeah yeah like that is I 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 unpredictable. And he is a child. Yeah, and here's another kid. So things get more and more tense, you know, as they're waiting for the food to arrive

and 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 asking 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 sobbing behind him. Like, that is wildly hostile. He is worse than Elon Musk.

He is worse than all of them. Steve Jobs is the most evil tech guy. I am sorry. What a fucking scumbag. Jesus, that is rare that I am shocked by shit, but Jesus H fuck. Oh my God. Whatever, like none of them are good people,

but like I don't think Elon Musk would do that to a seven year old. Like that's such- He values all 15 of his children. Yeah. Yeah. Oh my 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 napping kids cuz 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 a. Seven. Fucking awesome.

What is she supposed 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 kid. Get your shit together. What are you doing with your life? Yeah. I came here. Unshowered to spend my time with you. You should together get your shit to get what are you doing with your life?

Yeah, I came here unshowered to spend my time with you. Yeah. Oh my God. What a what a weird asshole. Jesus Christ. So it's it's cool like this night ends with Chris and Anleesa 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, they're basically had to be like, it's not your fault, he's just a dick. Terribly so, your father's a fucking asshole. 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 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 Om Malik who ran a Cycled Giga 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, he screamed at the MobileMe people, we know that one, he screamed, he fired people and elevators and I'm sure you've got so much worse to share. But this is horrifying.

This isn't just, it's one thing yelling at a grown ass man, it's another thing excoriating a child for their lack of eloquence or at all for anything. Even if they did something wrong, you don't yell at children. Yeah, it'd be one thing if she had broken something and he'd flipped. That's still really wrong. But at least there was a thing that you can say caused a problem, 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 and come to all the same conclusions.

Oh my God, keep going, sorry, I'm just starting. 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. Wozniak 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 Wozniak,

after the company has its IPO, they're gonna have relatively little to do with each other. 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 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. Wozniak stays with the Apple too, right? That is the thing that is

sustaining Apple's growth. That's nearly all of Apple's money up through the early 90s comes from the Apple too. They don't stop selling this thing until 1993. So 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 upgrading the processor. So they are like continually improving the Apple too.

This is like a real important job. Wozniak 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 II from this point forward. It's important that you understand what's actually funding everything Steve is doing right now is Wozniak's 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 Wasniacs, baby, right? People generally respect Steve for his vision, him being good at putting people together and all that kind of stuff, that sort of thing. But the Woz is the genius here. And it's also pretty well known that the Apple II is successful, in part because Wozniak 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 gonna 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 3. 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 3

is it can display both uppercase and lowercase letters. Like we finally got it guys, both kinds of letters. Hell yeah, baby. Yeah, it really, 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 Larry and G-Hot on you, although it's appropriate now that we're on Dune week as these episodes are being recorded.

So, but do the podcast. Yeah. Sorry. 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. I don't do into 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. Everyone in our country has a voice. It's something that says not just where you come from, but who you are. Welcome to NPR's Black Stories, Black Truths, a collection of podcasts and a celebration

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So yeah, we're at the Apple 3. So Wozniak is safely closer to a way of keeping the company profitable, and Jobs is taking like control of the Apple III project. And he lays out a design. One of the things, because this is his project, the was is not in the room, so there's nobody who he has to take seriously. He can just sort of dictate.

He's like, we're going to design the case before we actually build the computer. I wanna design this perfect case. And then you build a computer around it. The thing that needs to be dictated by the actual staff, 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 desk. We meaning someone else. We meaning this team of people

haven't a 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 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 and elevators quote, "'The Apple 3 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,

oh sorry, it's not mine. And I think the funniest thing about that is the lie. Oh, sorry. It's not mine. And that's like, first off, an extremely Silicon Valley way to describe a project. It's funny to me because of the way this guy is describing Apple III is how Steve Jobs treated his actual child, conceiving her and then denying the G-Edity 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 III 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 that always ends badly. Like folks take it if you suddenly make $100 million 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 Jell-O-Man. Avoid helicopters as well. Avoid helicopters as well. Wozniak is not Harrison Ford. He does not bounce back right away. It messes him up. He's basically out of the picture for five years. It's not coincidentally when this character of the company's founding bounces that the character of Apple is also undergoing a change. Wozniak being out of the picture for a while isn't the only thing, but it's a sign of the times. Some of this comes down to the fact that CEO Michael Scott is obsessed with trying

to be the adult in the room and take the company in a more responsible direction. We needed these hippie hacker kids when we were getting off the door, but now it's time to become 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. But they also made their money quite boringly. Yes. And they have one of the all-time loser CEOs, 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 government contractors means that these guys are not being used to being

seen as disposable for the sake of a stock price. Their dads really hadn't been, and most of their dads like Wozniak come out of this aerospace world. So they're all very shocked when suddenly Apple starts acting like companies are increasingly going to act in the 80s 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 lore 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.

In fact, he's signed off on them. When a long time colleagues hears 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 $250 million. 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 just 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 1981.

Yeah, super early. 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 being like 1995, 15 years after this. You had to beat the shit out of them. Yeah. You had to like poke them so oh, yeah, they were horrible.

It's because they were, I think, resistive instead of capacitive, 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 touchscreens. I think this might be the future. And it's immediately clear to him and 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 the guys who were 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 yelling at us for bringing him inconvenient 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. What I think it's worth shit talking Steve for is he's really mean to people just by default, whenever he has 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? Yeah. 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, this is calculated. 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. 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 like deal with being told no with any, on anything. Cause he, 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 gonna make another personal computer. But this one's gonna be better. This one's not gonna be like the Apple 3.

This is gonna be the next Apple 2. 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 jobs 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's not he acknowledges this one. Well not it's, yeah, he does acknowledge the computer, at least for a while.

It's not going to go well. The Lisa's about as doomed as the Apple 3. 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 conflicts within the Apple 3 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 computer, 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 like 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 Ann. Like he's publicly insults it. He belittles his former, these people who just spent 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. Also, this is very much against the whole mythos of him being this master operator and manager. Yeah. Yeah. This is this is actually early day startup bullshit. Yeah. Just running, burning eight fires, killing things based on how upset you are. Yeah. And lighting, he's part of why the Lisa doesn't... He costs the company a lot of money by

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 and while he is like fighting wars with his machine that he hates and is angry at while he is like fighting wars with his coworkers in order to try to get to make it better. No one gets him credit for it either.

No, no, no. Everyone knows this was everyone likes was. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And that is what establishes you have to understand here. You know, I when I say Macintosh, you could do the, oh, wow, this is the moment. But like, no, 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

2. Like that's the fucking thing, you know? But Steve hates the Apple 2 and he also now hates the Lisa. In the book, Infinite Loop, Malone writes, Steve Jobs no longer cared about the two. He publicly derided it, saying the two group was the Dolan Boring Division that it had shitty ideas and calling its engineers Clydesdales, because they were little more than Dole Draft Horses. Even worse, Jobs undermined 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 going to want to stop by in this thing in a while. This new thing coming up. These guys are all drug

addicts. He's fucking idiot. Morons. It is so it is so that guy that like, Oh, everything you have is built on the back of this computer, Steve, don't treat it like, and he and Wozniak are gonna have like a conflict because the Apple II keeps getting left out at like these big corporate events he'll do when he'll talk about the other teams. And the Wozniak's like, it makes all of our money.

As he should. Yeah, and this is not just jobs too, because I think Wozniak 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're always gonna 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 that knew exactly the thing to put his money in that knew a safe bear. No, and it's not 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 Chabb 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 Markula. And 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 a soothing for his colleagues. What?

And see, this is where I'm back to liking him. Logistically. That's awesome. Logistically, is he sitting on top of it with his feet in there? Is he bringing a chair in? I think he's standing, he gets a shoe off and puts his foot in the toilet.

I don't know, this is actually something Fastpender does in one of the movies. No, I think he would just dip it, but I am basing that off of Hollywood magic. Because I guess it's the water that surrounds. You could get. This has ruined my day. You could get a guide to your feelings.

I will say the more, I don't know. I eat, 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 foot bath and just held meetings there. But actually. Oh, really? Oh, really, Robert? That's really. No, you know what?

I don't think that's good. That's bougie, Sophie. This is respectable. Stick in your foot in the toilet or using the $20 Amazon foot. What? And trying to hide it on a recording from Sophie. Both of those things. Jesus Christ.

I'm just saying, Steve and I are mavericks, baby. I hate everything that just happened. Yeah, I'm going to play that Jeep Renegade commercial again and rock out. Wow. Yeah. I think we broke. And what a close fucking freak. 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 foot bath, Steve. You can use a sink as a foot bath. There's a fucking sink. There's a sink in the same room. Yeah, 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 would think it's funny foot massage podcaster.

Yeah, that's right. I'm going to get a massage chair, Sophie. And I'm going to start one of those ASMR podcasts where it's just the sound of a massage chair. As I get a massage, we're going to make $12 million. Just dipping your feet in the toilet. Yeah. Yeah. What's that?

Tannel just quit. Oh, wow. Yeah. Yeah. What's that? Tan will just quit. Sorry, Dan. So the Lisa debuts to pretty disappointing sales about a year before the Mac is scheduled to have its release. And while Jobs threw himself into this project, he remained only an occasional presence in the life of his daughter. She recalls being utterly bowled 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 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. It's just a coincidence I named a computer after my daughter has nothing to do with you. Sorry, kid.

Big Simpsons 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 like go to an event and people will ask him like, oh, that's Lisa. Is that who you named 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 picked 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 Yeah acronym for Lisa to mean so that he was so dedicated to not being there for his kid. Yeah, he has a team of men help him not be there for his kid. He's diverting company resources to help to help his child. 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. Yeah stinky fucking toilet freak. Such a shitty thing to do. And we're going to 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 going to be in play later. So this has to do with when they another acronym. No, Bono better gonna be in play later, Sobie. Does this have to do with when they... Is that another acronym? No. Bono? Better off not around, around?

I don't know. I could make it work. I mean, there we go. She asked the redditters, they might agree. I was still mad when they violated all our phones by putting that YouTube album on them without our consent. Does it have to do with that? So funny.

I do think it would now be really funny if some 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 blamed Apple. How did you get this on my PC, you sons of bitches? I don't know, maybe listen in. Russia, that's how you can really fuck with us.

Throw a YouTube CD on the DoD's hard drive. You're in rare form today. Thank you. It's great. I'm really feeling the power of the spirit move through me. You're doing great. What's the spirit of jobs? I also have only 19 minutes left on my memory card.

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 appliance you're talking about? I have two tools. A hammer and a gun. An appliance. That's all I need. A dishwasher, refrigerator.

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? Cause dishwashers are inherently not very sexy. Hey, wanna say that word? Not really, Sophie. Dishwalla.

You can't make a dishwasher be sexy, right? And Raskin's idea, which I think is pro, I mean, obviously it's good. It's what all computing winds up being based around. Also, as somebody who likes things clean, disagree. Sure. So if you 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 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 UI today, right?

Cause it's just the only way shit works pretty much. But back then it's like the Xerox Skunkworks 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

then he hops over halfway onto the Mac, which is also an early GUI computer. I just wouldn't make that clear. It's also worth noting that Bill Gates sees basically the same demo and they also take a lot from Xerox in order to make what becomes Windows. Everyone copied Xerox. That's pretty funny. Yeah, everyone copied Xerox. Yeah, that is funny. It's really funny. 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 profit off of this. Fuck you. People will 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 son of a bitch. I robbed them. It's my scam. 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 it that 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 gonna be too expensive to sell a lot of these things. The Apple II 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, 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 $2,600 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 is 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 businessmen who should have known better And this is where we get jobs at his cult leaderiest, 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 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 gonna become the CEO of Apple. He's headhunted at Steve Jobs' request. Jobs wanted a, and one of the reasons why Jobs goes after Scully, become the CEO of Apple. He's headhunted at Steve Jobs' 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 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, it 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 because they recognize that you were brilliant, right? I don't want to be a pep. I don't want to be a pep. I don't want to be a pep. I don't want to be a pep. I don't want to be a pep. I don't want to be a pep. I don't want to be a pep. I don't want to be a pep.

I don't want to be a pep. I don't want to be a pep. I don't want to be a pep. I don't want to be a pep. I don't want to be a pep. I don't want to be a pep. I don't want to be a pep. I don't want to be a pep.

I don't want to be a pep. I don't want to be a pep. I don't want to be a pep. I don't want to be a pep. I don't want to be a pep. I don't want to be a pep. I don't want to be a pep. I don't want to be a pep.

I don't want to be a pep. I don't want to be a pep. I don't want to be a pep. I don't want to be a pep. I don't hate Pepsi, Sophie. I like all poison. I'm gonna say, 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, Strychnine, it's all good, baby. Turpentine. Sure. Why not? Drink some turpentine. It's all yum yum yum. A substance. put substances inside you and see what happens You know, that's that's my advice Personally, I think you should get back to the script before your time before your SD card is full Robert Oh, yeah, we're we're at 12 minutes 44 seconds Maybe dannel can throw in like the 24 ticking, you know, from that show. Welcome to NPR's Black Stories, Black Truths, a collection of podcasts and a

celebration of the hosts in journalism who've always spoken truth to power. Our voices are as varied, nuanced and dynamic as the black experience and stories should never be about us without us. Find NPR Black Stories, Black Truths on the iHeart radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. All of a sudden he says, Linda, I see a skull. Deep in the heart of the Ozarks, a mysterious disappearance turns into a grisly discovery. Two young women murdered.

My name is M. William Phelps. For the past several years, I've been reinvestigating the cases of two young women, abducted from their small towns, their bodies dumped deep in the Ozark Woods, with a connection to one very familiar name. He chose his own moniker, binded them, tortured them, killed them, B2K. Cold cases I'm breaking wide open as a heated confrontation with an alleged psychopath and Seuss.

Did you kill those girls? You got all this information, then why did you ask me if you already knew? Long-held secrets finally revealed sending authorities rushing to confront a suspect who's been hiding in plain sight for decades. Listen to Paper Ghost season four on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you find your favorite podcasts. What up, I am Dramos, host of the Life as a Gringo Podcast. Now, this is a show for the no sabo kids, the 200%ers.

Here we celebrate your otherness and embrace living in the gray area. If you ever felt like you were always too much this while also never being enough that, this is the podcast for you. Every Tuesday I'll be bringing you conversations around personal growth, issues affecting the Latin community, and much more via my own personal stories along with interviews with inspiring thought leaders from our community. Then every Thursday I'll be tackling trending stories and current events from our community that you need to know.

So much of what makes our community so beautiful is our diversity yet too often those of us who don't fit into this dumb stereotypical box of whatever it means to be Latino are left without a voice or just forgotten about. On this show, I celebrate the uniqueness of our culture and invite you to walk in your authenticity. Listen to Life as a Gringo as a part of the Microtura podcast network available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast or whatever you get your podcasts. John Scully. So this guy, John Scully, comes up with the Pepsi Challenge and it causes like

the soda wars. 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 base. And he sees Apple as 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 thinks 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 Jobs is, for all that he pretends to be this enlightened, creative thinker, he is a guy who identifies with the marketers and the finance dudes and a lot of these, in terms of what they're actually doing, these are the people that he is a lot more like when it comes to his actual behavior. 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 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 the CEO is basically the chief salesman, right? And pulling for Skully 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 1% in Coke or 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 soda. You can buy a soda for pocket change. You can't purchase a $2,000 or $2,500 Macintosh computer on a whim, right? They're not the same kinds of like ass of the customer. 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 try a Pepsi today at lunch instead of a Coke? That's easy. You're saying, hey, why don't you consider 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 Skoli and he wouldn't take no for an answer. And Skoli 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 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 Lezy 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 Hewlett Packard? Why do you want somebody out of the soft 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, Job said, what we're doing has 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. 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. Yeah, the thing that everyone is doing. Think different. I think that everybody's doing, think different. Yeah, but I think it works on a guy like Skoli, right? It's gonna 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. Everyone 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 lady or whoever is going to like, fix a major social problem, right? It's the same impulse. 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 wanna like 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 answer was basically, I don't know, bro. She's got to weird to me. Yeah. Stinky goblin.

Listen to your wives about the stinky goblin who tries to get you to take a job, folks. If you're ever in this situation. For Jobs. For Jobs, yeah. So back at Apple, Jobs' 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 40% 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 made on another Sunday, they had lunch, 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, Scully 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 in 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 tech None of them seem to want to show him like Being a cult leader manipulating rich people to fought 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, 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 is WasNiak one? He wants to have an adventure with his best friend. So that's how Jobs frames it. What does Scully want? To change the world by selling Pepsi, right?

And that's what he gives him, you know? By selling a computer. 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 and 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 1984. After the failure of the Lisa, the company desperately needed some hype to carry it through. The Apple II was still selling strong, but it's starting to fall off. 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 by the ad firm Chaiit Day. They had written this ad, this is the famous 1984 ad,

where you've got these lines of people all up in front of the screen, where this big brother figure is preaching, reading a bunch of political ideology tracks to them, basically, and then this woman in athletic shorts with a mall runs up and she throws the hammer through the screen, and it's like, Apple's new computer is gonna stop 1984, bro.

Ha ha ha ha. Honestly, kind of hilarious that, like, looking back at that. It is, it is. Especially because it was marked by, like, the Pepsi guy and the stinky weirdo. Yeah, the Pepsi guy and the smelly weirdo. Yeah. So, the 1984 ad had actually been written before Chai

a day contracted with Apple. But, and this is what's funny to me, 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, 1984 is coming up, someone's going to have the 1984 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. 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 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. Now, I don't know are these, because there's different kinds of skinheads, but I also feel like the skinheads who are, you can most easily get in an Apple commercial might not be the good kind, I don't know.

Yeah. Yeah. Trouble, so. Trouble good. It's a huge hit with the fans. And I wanna 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. All right. On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you'll see why 1984 won't be like 1984. This adds like a huge hit with the listeners, but Apple's executives are kind of like furious about this, right? When they see the ad for the first time, they're all of the reaction of all the people who'd turned it down.

They're like, what the fuck is this thing? Why are we trying to use this like dark bleak apocalyptic ad to sell computers? Cancel a bunch of our ad spots. And Skully has to tell Chiette Day to sell off their Super Bowl airtime. And Jay Chiette over at the company like basically fights back, they had they had bought like a 60 second and a 30 second slot and Chai it sells the 30 second slot. But then he's like, it's too late for us to sell the longer one. So 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 parodyed a bunch? Or because like some snooty ad people think it was great Or should you judge it based on like how 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 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 two million sales. And in fact, when he comes up with, 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 to 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. 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 be compatible with IBM, right? Not only that, he's like, I don't want this to be compatible with IBM's or with the Lisa, right? This other computer while 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 builds this situation where every team is really siloed from the other teams. You've got the Apple II, the Apple III, the Lisa and the Mac teams, and 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 Skully gets in right before the 1984 ad. He's there for these kind of disappointing Mac sales and Jobs' reality distortion field starts to fail.

And Skully is like, well, we need to make some changes. I don't care 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. Skully also makes himself head of the Apple II team, which Jobs hates because he hates the Apple II. And Skully doesn't know enough to be the head of the Apple II 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 II 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 disks aren't the right technology. He's like, I've got, we've got this bespoke replacement for the floppy disk called the Twiggy Drive, and this is gonna be the future of memory. And they never get it working very well, right? Like, part of why the Mac gets delayed is he's obsessed with it having a Twiggy Drive,

and that has to be working, rather than just putting it a disk drive like everyone else uses. Using the disk everyone uses. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I want to quote from Infinite Loop here, because it really gets to like, one of Jobs' more significant technical fuck-ups. Jobs, in fact, had been partly responsible for the problems with Twiggy.

His rule laid down for aesthetic reasons that Apple computers 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 uncooled heart of an Apple computer, a high speed advanced drive like a Twiggy simply cooked, burning out its own chips and melting or distorting the Mylar Discette. He's so angry about the concept of a fan that he shackles this thing to a melting Twiggy drive. It's very funny.

Hey 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 floppy. And actually it's only able to launch with a floppy because they decide like near the end that they just can't make it work. But thankfully somebody on the team

has sort of secretly against jobs as orders worked on a way to fit in a floppy drive with a Macintosh. And so the day is 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.

He was 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 like, he is to an extent good at marketing, but he is 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 II, the 2X, which would

have had, they were 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 Jobs, Jobs like personally goes out of its way to strangle this thing and its cradle. This thing must do less. Yeah. Yeah. So Jobs also ensured that the Apple 2 team was cut out of any credit or praise during the annual Apple media

events he had lined. And again, this helps to kind of push Wozniak to quit the company. And you can see why the Woz comes back and he gets right into Apple 2 stuff. And he's kind of frustrated by how everyone else seems to treat them like shit, except for Skoli. It's not a coincidence that he does this, that he kind of like bales on the company about a decade after Steve Jobs stole that money from the Atari job.

Because while Jobs doesn't like the Apple II and won't say anything nice about him, but he knows Wozniak is a star, so he pulls him out of Apple to work for a while to do press for the Mac. And Wozniak being a good company man does it. And while he's on this media tour, traveling around to like talk up Jobs' Mac, he reads the first book about Apple and reads this story about Jobs stealing $5,000 or $7,000 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 1984 commercial had not moved a lot of Macs, but its critical success had convinced jobs to do whatever the

Chiat day people said. And they follow up the 1984 commercial with the Limings commercial, which shows like IBM customers as Limings 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 computer or you'll die. And by this point, sales have become dire enough and like he gets in trouble for this commercial. Isn't that around the time the game Lemmings came out as well?

I think it would have predated that. That was in the 90s. Oh, it was the 80s, yeah, Lemmings was in the 90s game. My bad, my bad. Yeah it would have predated that. That was in the 90s. Oh, yeah, it's the 80s. Lemmings is a 90s game. My bad, my bad. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is kind of the mid-80s. And like right after that,

he comes out at like the Macworld event and he proposes a detente 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's 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 Skully is heading overseas to celebrate a major sale. Somebody warns Skully, and he shows that he and Jobs fight it out in front of the board basically, and Skully 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 Chrisanne 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 had on a couple of decisions that jobs made that were wrong in the moment, but right in the longterm. He wanted to fight Wozniak on expansion slots for the Apple too, which is dumb then, but in the longterm, that is where technology trended. And it 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 screens, 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 at Apple, his next few years, he's going to make some really good bets. Throughout the 90s, he establishes this new computer company, Next,

which if you're looking to spell it, it 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 12 grand each and he means them for the education market, right? Like it's this. The most cost-averse part of... 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 is like nobody wants, right?

Nobody's buying based on that. It looks like an old safe. Yeah, they eventually repurposed that design for the Xbox. 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 system, 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 at Apple, right? A few years later, by like 97, they buy Next and they bring Jobs back in to run the company. He also, during this kind of like most of the 90s

into regnum period of his life or whatever, he found Pixar, which 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 a similar matter, he makes some strides in improving his relationship with his daughter over this period of time. He also provides more support to Chrisann. He eventually buys her a house. And I think Mona Simpson is the large.

It seems like Mona comes into his life and sees how he's treating Lisa and Chrisann. It's like, man, you Steve Jobs, buy her a fucking house. Buy your kids some new clothes. What the fuck are you doing, Steve? Stop this. Like you're being a dick for no reason. And he actually listens to her, which, you know, I guess maybe says something. That said, he is still Steve Jobs. And I am never going to say in this period that he is a great dad. And

he's always weirdly aggro about his daughter, like wanting anything from him, any kind of acknowledgement or anything else. One moment she relates in her book is that like, when she's like, I think 12 or something, he's driving her around in his brand new Porsche, right? And she asks him 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 12 year olds who wouldn't want their dad's Porsche if they could have it.

Right? Especially when their dad is filthy rich. Yeah, and they grew up poor, right? Their earliest memories are on wealth. Any kids could have- Thanks to Steve Jobs. Thanks directly as a result of Steve Jobs, she grew up poor. Yeah, yeah, this could be, if she's like 30,

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 her 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 in here, it's like, you're not getting any acknowledgement at all from me, like I mean, like, you're getting nothing from me, period. What a devastating thing to tell a little kid, you know?

Like a 12-year-old at this point. Yeah, like a 12-year-old. It's one thing to say, like, I think a reasonable thing to say is like,. Like a 12 year old at this point. Yeah, like a 12 year old. It's one thing to say like, I think a reasonable thing to say is like, yeah, you'll, if you need a car, you'll get like a nice normal, like, a camera or 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. It would mean I'd been chosen and had a place despite the fact that he was a loo for absent. And when I was fastened 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. Such a fucking devastating thing to think. Darkness this man has put inside this person. Even then she was still desperate to be loved by him. Of course. She's his dad or he's her dad. Yeah. 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 named the Lisa after her. Eventually, when she's like a young adult, I think he finally breaks down. She might 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 story. Yes. Okay. 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 rapprochement 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 Jobs starts asking about the early days of Apple. Then Bono asked, so was the Lisa computer named after her? And you know, Bono's just 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, it. He like knows Steve had a computer named the Lisa. He meets Lisa. He's like, oh, it'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. Yup, my father said. I studied my father's face. What had changed? Why did he admit it now after all these years? Of course it was named after me, I thought then. His lie 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 Werner Herzog style things, because Steve Jobs blotted her soul out. 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 from. I'm like, yeah, but you earned that. Yeah, you put in the work.

This is hazard pay. Yeah. Work for the, like she should have got billions. She should not have, oh my God. Fucking Bono. That's the steep, he's the good guy. He's not the bad guy in this. He's the only good thing Bono's done in a long time.

He's not the bad guy in this. I had to do something to make up for fucking putting that album on all of our phones. That's the first great thing he did. The second thing was the Spider-Man musical. The second... Oh, right. I'll give him... There was one other great thing. I got bought a paid... This is now a Bono podcast.

Intel and Nokia flew me out to Dublin once to report on this operating system they were making called Mego that was like that was gonna be their Android you haven't heard of Mego because it was a flop and they like they flew us all out there and like 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. It just 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.

He did look the part and it's, you know, I'll give him that. I'll give him that. The funniest thing Bono could do is just claim he was an impersonator though. Maybe it was Bono. Yeah, maybe it was. That's his hobby. He's both getting rich people to reveal their secrets and pretending to be a Bono impersonator though. Yeah, maybe it was. Yeah, maybe it was. That's his hobby. He's both getting rich people to reveal their secrets and pretending to be a Bono impersonator. God willing. All right. Well, Ed, is there anywhere people can find you? You can find me at Ed Zitron on Twitter

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